Neither Man nor Beast
by usernameunique
Summary: Winston has always been... unique. See how his story evolves with his identity as he struggles to find where he truly belongs.
1. Memories

He used to ask the others about their memories. Childhoods, upbringings, favorite places and family vacations. They would give him bits and pieces, describing their youths like they were looking back on it through a kaleidoscope or a mother's scrapbook, filling in the blanks between specific snapshots with the mundane, intricate complexities of emotion. Winston never understood that; he could pinpoint the exact moment he was able to remember things.

He knew it was an effect of the genetic experiments. Cerebral cortex augmentation, just one pit stop on the race he was entered into to make an animal's mind more like a human's for the same reason man went to the moon in the first place; to see if it could be done. In all his research, he was never able to figure out a better reason to do anything. Then again, science and the dreams of the heart never got along, because to spread your wings and live among the stars is irrational. Ironic, that he, a life devoted to science, lived just there, where dreams dared to go, among the stars.

His earliest memory is its own snapshot: an image of his hands, with particular focus on the intricacy of the lines in his palms. Before that, nothing. After that, everything he ever was. But his own story was never enough.

He used to ask the others about their childhoods.

Angela never entertained the question. Sometimes, she'd leave with a friendly smile; most of the time, she'd look down while her normally pleasant expression turned grim. He can still remember seeing the pain in her blue eyes, like lightning flashing under the sea. He remembers an instance, one of many instances he recalls in a graveyard, where she spoke to headstones like they could hear her, like they were people. He didn't conclude until later that, to her, they could, and they were. After all, heroes never die.

Others were easier to goad answers from. Commander Reyes talked about the Church of Santa Maria in the barrio, and how he was fond of its bells. He also told stories of how he and the gangs of neighborhood kids would fight during school for the hell of it, resuming their feuds after class was out, when they decided to even attend.

"There were worse things we could have been doing," Reyes had said, "like meth, or being pussies."

Commander Morrison talked about his farm, how he and his brothers and friends would play in the loft when they were younger, or how he was almost caught in a combine on more than one occasion, and how the stud horse, Charlie, kicked.

Winston sometimes shared his memories. He told them how the moon looked, or how it felt to be in a spaceship as it blasted off in next to zero gravity. The memory immediately after the image of his hands is of restraints around his forehead, arms and legs, and needles on robotic arms sticking him, the blue serum in the syringes emptying beneath his skin. He still remembers the sound of his own screaming: high pitched, terrified, and primal, more animal than man, and the same screams coming from the next room over. He wasn't the only test subject who hated needles.

He never shared that one.

He used to ask the others about their families. Lena used to talk about her father's study, how it smelled of Earl Grey, Crown and Macanudos. She talked about the old pictures of archaic members of the Oxton family hung on the walls, back when all pictures were taken in black and white, and the pictures of her father when he was younger, stronger, his mustache absent, and in the Royal Air Force. She talked about the bookshelves, and how she used to sit on his knee while he read her Tolkien. She'd always giggle at that part.

Jesse used to talk about the yellow dress his mother wore on Sundays, and how it made her brown eyes look green. He used to talk about her cooking, and how whenever a guest came over she made plates and plates full of green chili, chicken mole or tamales. He talked about how she used to love Clint Eastwood and the Marlboro Man. He talked about how she cried when she found out about Deadlock, and how he missed her.

Genji talked about his older brother, but very rarely. A happy memory would cross his mind: a joke, a story, something small, and his robotic voice sounded happier for a few short moments before _other_ memories of his brother came back.

Winston never had a family. His biological parents were used only for breeding; he and his siblings were promptly taken and placed in controlled environments by Horizon staff shortly after birth. He never recognized any of his brothers or sisters, but he and the other test subjects were allowed regimented social time in a recreational enclosure. The strongest of the young gorillas got to use the tire swing and the jungle gym while the weaker ones were forced to play with basketballs and teddy bears. Winston grew quite close to a specific teddy bear. Its name was Pollux, after the star he could see through his habitation suite's window.

Social hierarchy is something developed very early on in the evolution of a species. Wolves form packs, lions organize prides, cattle gather in a herd, and gorillas form troops. In these groups, the alphas are the physically strongest. The alphas did not play with teddy bears; they played on the jungle gym. Winston tried to play on the jungle gym once… once.

In the absence of external danger, there was no mutual benefit for the test subjects' troop to include all members. There was no reason to find safety in numbers, and there was no way for the alphas to identify themselves other than infighting. Instinct was still somewhere inside, even though by their first year, most of the gorillas on the moon showed intellectual capacity similar to most human six year olds, six year olds with more strength than most professional athletes. The first time Winston tried to play on the jungle gym, his arms were broken, and the incident was marked in Horizon's research observations.

He used to ask the others about family vacations. Torbjorn used to reminisce about his family's first trip to Denmark, and the first time he and his cousin had gone to Amsterdam. He was quite fond of that story.

Reinhardt talked about every city he had ever visited, and sometimes, it seemed like he had visited them all; some of them, he even visited in peace time. He often told a story of Paris, the city of light, up in flames, while the Eiffel tower was unscathed. If hope was an expression, a tone of voice, a glimmer of the eye, it was in that story.

The farthest trip Winston ever made was over 230,000 miles. The first time he went somewhere other than his habitation suite or the recreational enclosure, he went to the medical wing. He remembers the smell, the sting in his nostrils from the sanitizer, and the crisp starch of the sheets. He remembers how the hair on his arms itched under the white plaster of his casts. He remembers the first time he met the man with the glasses.

* * *

A minor fall. A major lift. A pentatonic arpeggio. He always liked music. Winston smiles as he hums to himself, a nostalgic fluctuation in his deep voice as a song from his past warmly marches out of Athena's PA.

They'd composed songs about Overwatch, mostly for the holovids. Epic orchestral scores that built into heroic suites were in every production promoting the organization, especially in its younger days. Those compositions always held a dear place in his heart; they still do.

Winston had always liked instrumental songs better. The ones with words seemed… hollow, when he was younger, before he knew what most of the words meant. He was able to appreciate the poetry in them now, but on the moon a song about a blue sky or the sea, or loved ones was meaningless, because they relied on the shared experience of the listener. The lunar sky was black, water was never seen in quantities more than a few cups, and love songs made it feel like love was exclusive to earth… it felt alien.

But instrumentals… you don't have to know any language to feel that emotion. They studied it on the test subjects at Horizon. Positive and negative reinforcement. They would play Beethoven right before feeding, Mozart when they were asked to solve puzzles and Chopin when it was time for bed. To this day, the Moonlight Sonata makes Winston's mouth water. Pavlov with a classical twist.

Even after he made it to Earth, Winston took a long time to realize just how much emotion could be put into a verse in a love song. He always wondered why the love songs were so often sad, until he first fell in love.

* * *

Dr. Harold Winston was the first friend he ever made. Their first meeting was documented by the medical bay's cameras, and so too would the majority of their subsequent meetings be recorded.

The infant gorilla jumps and reacts as most animals do, with flight, when the doors to the medical bay open and Dr. Harold Winston enters. He is not a large man; delicate glasses balance on the bridge of his Roman nose, and his stubbly whiskers form a grey shadow along his jawline. He is well dressed under his immaculate lab coat, and in his hands he holds a transparent holopad.

When he sees the small ape trying to escape his restraints with greater fervor as he approaches, Dr. Winston halts his advance. The gorilla slowly calms to an uneasy state of stillness, the same kind of stillness between gusts of wind in a storm.

"Hi," he says simply, smiling gently as fearful amber eyes stare up at him.

The gorilla's arms, casts plastered around both wrists, slowly sign, "Hello."

The test subjects had shown remarkable cognitive development thus far. Ever since the initial serum injections, most of the infant gorillas had shown intelligence more than three hundred percent greater than their control group counterparts of the same age, and the graphs showed promise for a steepening trend. Among the first things the Horizon project had sought to teach the gorillas was the lexicon alphabet, then American Sign Language. It was amazing, how most of them were able to understand basic sentences without accompanying signs for translation. In other words, some of the gorillas were able to comprehend English.

"I'm Dr. Harold Winston. I am the head researcher here."

The gorilla's spiky hair flows as his eyes dart submissively back and forth between the floor and the eyes of his visitor. He is nervous, and who is to blame him. He's been more or less an outcast among the subjects thus far.

"Gorilla 28," signs the ape slowly, not looking up.

Dr. Winston looks at the number on the gorilla's shoulder; black numbers against the tight white leotard confirm that test subject #28 is introducing himself. Remarkable. Before the conversation continues, Dr. Winston's holopad comes to life, and research notes are scribbled down with a stylus.

"How do you feel?" he asks.

"Arm hurt," signs 28, "sad."

Harold is moved. He can see the expression more in the gorilla's eyes than in the stiff motion of his arms and hands.

"Your arms hurt because you haven't taken your medicine."

The gorilla's eyes widen, and he looks away as he again tries to pull free of the restraints gluing him to the bed. When he realizes he is not escaping, he lets out a small yelp, and plops down, frantically signing away.

"Medicine scared," he signs, over and over again.

Dr. Winston recalls that the serums were called 'medicine' to the test subjects. He also recalls the reaction test subject 28 had to the injection. The words "phobia of medical treatment likely due to unresolved traumatic stress" are scrawled onto the holopad.

"I understand," he says as he tried to take a step closer, only aggravating the gorilla more; the leather restraints groan against the ape's powerful pull, even despite fractured ulnas.

He reaches into his pocket, and produces an incentive that has proven common among the test subjects: a vacuum sealed sleeve of peanut butter, the kind in soldiers' and astronauts' meal packs.

"Would… this make it better?" he asks, uncurling his fingers just out of the gorilla's reach to reveal the peanut butter lying in his palm; immediately, the ape's eyes brighten, but he is still cautious.

"Treat?" 28 signs, his lips parting with a small smacking sound.

"Yes, it's a treat," laughs Dr. Winston, "But only if you take your medicine."

As he finishes, the gorilla again retracts, a very human looking fear crossing his face again.

"It's not like that medicine," he corrects, a kind reassurance in his voice; he scratches his whiskers as he thinks of a better way to coax the gorilla, "This is… _health candy_. But you're only allowed to have it when you're sick or hurt."

28 nods, and pulls towards the doctor until his restraints lock out, and slowly, his fingers dash about, forming silent words.

"Gorilla hurt. Treat please?"

Harold smiles.

"Do you promise to take your _health candy?"_

28 pauses, slowly, looking down at the peanut butter, then at the pills at the bedside, but he looks longest up at Harold. It's amazing, when the animal's lips mimic the expression on the man's face, and they curl into a smile. This was the exact moment 28 began to trust Dr. Harold Winston as a man trusts another man, and it was regarded as one of the earliest and greatest breakthroughs in neurological enhancement since the founding of the study.

To Harold Winston, it was a profound moment, in which he wondered if his work was right, if he was playing God.

To test subject 28, it was the first time he had ever made a friend. It was also the beginning of a culinary obsession of pureed nuts.

Amber eyes gleam as a hairy hand snatches the peanut butter, and the plastic sleeve between white teeth, the gorilla's index finger comes up to his lips, then opens into a wide palm before descending onto his own fist.

"Promise."


	2. Schematics

Winston hums to himself whenever he works. He remembers how the others used to react. He would be wielding a soldering gun or adjusting blueprints with Pachelbel's Canon practically dancing from his diaphragm when someone would walk into his cluttered, messy lab.

Angela and Reinhardt would always try to guess which composition he was humming; Angela almost always guessed right, and Reinhardt only ever guessed Beethoven. Commander Reyes would shake his head condescendingly or laugh; something about a gorilla and classical music didn't sit right with him. But his favorite song, the one they played on the Overwatch holovids, Reyes didn't seem to mind as much. But that didn't stop Winston from humming Requiem as his designs took form beneath his hands, or thinking of Fur Elise as he peeled a banana during a break.

Today, he hums the nocturnes, because he's tired, as he works on his power armor. He's had so much time of late, he has little left to modify except its polish, but out of habit, he still refers to the blueprints he keeps pinned to the walls.

Each of them is a story of its own. His armor. His armor's thrusters.

The rocket he first designed to get to Earth, its schematics expansive and detailed and marked over the chalk with red marker because that's all he had left. The centerpiece of the blueprint, the module, still hangs over him now, suspended from the ceiling of his workshop as a reminder of how enigmatically profoundly space flight sucks, and as a souvenir of when the second chapter of his life began.

The communications satellite's blueprint, the one he'd launched only a few months ago, hung next to the rocket's. He'd sent it up in hopes of using its signal to reach Overwatch agents, those that were left, around the world; he is still waiting to broadcast a message, the Petras Act's liturgical outlawing of his family ever meeting together again still booming in his mind.

The shield generator he still can't get to work, so many of the original drawings and words crossed out and erased, replaced with frustrated, jagged lines of white, a stain over the right corner when his drink had spilled and he'd cussed its loose bottle cap, sounding like Jesse used to.

Then there was the chronal harness.

* * *

Winston first learned about an Einstein-Rosen bridge on the moon. Harold had taught him, and even showed him the age old metaphor of folding a piece of paper in half, punching a hole through it, then unfolding it again to show him how it worked. A theoretical connection between two points in space time. _Theoretical._

The day of the Slipstream's first test flight is cold. Stereotypical English weather; the Thames was grey, the sky was grey, the wind was still and the air was damp.

Today was the only day any of the agents had wanted to talk about for the past month. Winston was not yet an agent, more of a contractor while his situation was processed by higher, and while the others were still getting used to him, there was plenty of hype around the R&D labs. The technology, the innovation, what it could mean for Overwatch and the world if they were able to produce teleportation technology. The beginning of a new era, they had called it. If it worked.

Winston was not on the team that developed the Slipstream, but he knows enough about how it is supposed to work to know how dangerous today's test flight will be. The teleportation drive was revolutionary, but it had to work perfectly in order to work at all. The fact that the drive was directly under the cockpit was only part of the reason they had had such a hard time finding pilots to volunteer for the test flight.

An Einstein-Rosen bridge. A wormhole. A theoretical connection between two points in space time. It was no longer theoretical.

It started with a penny teleported only a few meters away from within a concrete bunker built to withstand JDAMS. After that, it was an entire sleeve of pennies. Then a car. Then a mouse. When the mouse survived the teleportation, the project transcended its experimental phase and had hundreds of millions of dollars in funding thrown at it. The result of that funding was on the tarmac now, its elegant wings swept back and its missile bays empty as it fueled up for its christening.

It amazes Winston, how everything Overwatch does somehow ties itself back into war. He's only been here a few months, but he has been able to pick up on this fact, both through his own eye and the media's constant coverage of the organizations every action. Genetic therapy that could be used to eradicate genetic diseases and birth defects is used instead to breed super soldiers. Teleportation technology that could be used to transport anything anywhere, that could completely replace the pollution caused by vehicle borne transportation, that could bring food to billions in the blink of an eye, is instead used to make a fighter jet.

As he watches the Slipstream being taxied out to the runway, like a model onto the red carpet, through the lab's window like many of the other esteemed scientists he works with, he wonders why. He wasn't around to see the Omnic Crisis. He's seen the holovids, as everyone has, but when he sees the omnics that work on the Watchpoints, looking and behaving like people with metal skin, he doesn't see towering specimens of death and destruction. But, when he sees Commander Morrison, or Captain Amari, or Commander Reyes look at the same omnics, there is a kindling of a fire in their eyes.

"They should all be destroyed," Commander Reyes had said, "It's only a matter of time before they gun for us again. Hit 'em first."

He wasn't the only one who thought that way, and in following all trails of logic, that sentiment was what made Winston know why every project that came into his workshop, more or less, was martial. After all, to the leaders of the world, the starving could wait; there was another war brewing. Nevertheless, every time he sees a new weapon roll off the line, Winston thinks:

"This isn't what Overwatch was meant to be."

The Royal Air Force and the press are all over Watchpoint London like ants to a pile of sugar. Winston remembers seeing a swarm of reporters with their microphones and holopads and cameras crowding around generals, their chests practically gleaming from the metal on them, on the tarmac. And among those generals is Commander Morrison, far below them in rank but above them in fame, about equal in respect. The face of Overwatch, smiling and answering questions with the same open ended responses Winston had heard a thousand times, mostly on a screen.

But, among the gaggle but not quite part of it, is a young woman, no more than 25. She wears an RAF flight suit and aviators, her hair is messy and her smile is radiant. When the press asks her questions, she giggles and answers with jokes, her voice pellucid and eager.

At first glance through the rainy window, Winston can tell this young woman is to be the pilot of their newest gem of technology. But the more he looks at her, the harder it is to look away. It feels like a curiosity, why, before she is about to undertake one of the greatest feats of the past century, she is not nervous. The closest venture Winston had made to what she is about to do was when he launched himself from the moon to Earth in a homemade rocket. He had been terrified, so terrified he had no spit in his mouth and had to truly focus, aggravatingly, on even the tiniest movements. It had taken him nearly an hour to get inside the module and buckle up, he was trembling so badly. And here she was, looking like she couldn't wait to get into the air.

Winston makes sure, that when the plane goes to take off, he is on the tarmac with Commander Morrison and half of Overwatch, and the press, looking up.

Take off goes smoothly. The subsequent climb goes well also. The jet streaks into the air, yellow streams from the afterburners following its ascent to heaven until the Slipstream is no more than a speck against the overcast sky. The cameras move to track the jet like buds of flowers follow sunlight, and a hush of anticipation falls over the spectators with their hands over their foreheads, shielding their eyes from the rain and menial light.

Winston overhears Dr. Tavington, the head developer of the Slipstream, explaining to one of the generals that such an altitude is necessary, as should the drive malfunction or be calibrated even slightly wrong, there is a very real risk of teleporting the jet below the ground. Needless to say, such a failure would be rare, but could be catastrophic.

As the engines' noise dulls, Winston hears Commander Morrison, the RAF brass all around him, calmly speak into the radio.

"Tracer 2-5, this is Eagle 1. Stand by for test of teleportation drive, break. Test 1, set for three hundred meter teleportation. Bearing, 12 o'clock. On my mark. 3… 2… 1… mark."

The jet suddenly blinks forward in a subtle flash of blue light, and Winston is reminded of a video skipping a frame.

"Tracer 2-5 this is Eagle 1. Report, over," beckons Commander Morrison, barely over the soft pitter patter of rain.

The crowd, in suspended animation, waits for a response, before the voice of the pilot crackles over the radio.

"Test successful Eagle 1! She handles like a dream!"

Winston watches as slaps on the back and handshakes work their way through the crowd. As congratulations are being shared the Slipstream dives, and levels off no more than two hundred feet off the tarmac. The entire crowd of witnesses watch as the jet screams in overhead with humid air folding around its wings, and does a barrel roll. Winston smiles; Tracer 2-5 is showboating, buzzing the brass in the tower like Maverick at Miramar. He can imagine her giggling inside the cockpit, and he finds himself smiling as she once again climbs back into the clouds for the next test of the teleportation drive.

The second test is the one that makes headlines.

 _Prototype Jet Disappears: Pilot Missing._

* * *

Winston is woken up by the sound of a small alarm, more of a notification. Startled, he shoots awake, interrupting a nasally snore and he hurries to compose himself, adjusting his glasses and wiping drool from his mouth. Drowsily, he looks around, and sees a small red light above a counter flashing, the source of the sound that had woken him. The counter reads 00:01, and it tells the time since the last chronal event inside the isolation capsule.

As he realizes what has happened, he turns, and briefly sees his reflection in the glass of the isolation capsules' window. But something inside the capsule stirs, and the automated lights switch on, revealing a young woman inside. She wears flannel pajamas and slippers, courtesy of her employers, as if they could provide her some comfort in spite of her… predicament.

Her back is to the windows, and she turns slowly. Through the glass, their eyes meet. It is almost comical, how identical their expressions are, wide eyed and startled, and slowly, their tense muscles relax.

Winston goes to look away, averting her brown eyes, but in the process bumps his workstation. Frantically, he tries to catch the objects as they fall to the rhythm of the first movement of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, left on from when he'd fallen asleep at work: a soldering iron in one hand, a schematic in the other, a central processor in a foot. He does not save the jar of peanut butter, and it clatters to the otherwise clean floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the girl, whom he recognizes as the pilot of the Slipstream, giggling at him.

He gets back up with about as much grace as he first fell with, the sound of his workstation table grinding on the floor as he leans on it for support resounding through the cavernous room, and reorganizes everything as it was. As he hobbles over to retrieve the jar of peanut butter, picking it up and blowing it clean of dust, his eyes once again stray to the isolation chamber.

The pilot is right up next to the glass, her hands leaning against the window. She smiles, and waves at him, only with her slender fingers moving. Winston waves back.

He can tell she's bored and wants his company; she sits cross legged just inside the glass, watching him intently; but he doesn't know why. No one else has wanted to talk to him. It takes her beckoning him over with a wave for Winston to actually approach the glass.

"You're very shy, aren't you?" she asks as he walks up on all fours, and sits down cross legged on the opposite side of her window; the sound of her voice is muffled inside the chamber, but he can hear her.

She speaks with a Kings' Row accent, English but far from the refined, uppity accents of Kensington or Notting Hill. Her skin is clear and she is well groomed, aside from her hair, which looks almost as if she had just gotten out of bed. Something about her demeanor reminds Winston of bubbles.

"Only around strangers," he answers, imitating her smile.

"I'm Lena," she says cordially, "I'd shake your hand, but…" she gestures at the glass as she finishes.

"Winston," he responds, tapping his chest with a curled fist.

It is a spectacle to be witnessed, the petite woman and the massive ape in matching postures, facing one another as they share introductions through the glass. Lena giggles briefly, covering her mouth politely with one hand, and she musses her already disheveled hair a bit.

"I've never met a talking gorilla before."

"Oh I've met hundreds," Winston says in jest with a grin, and she laughs now out loud, no attempt to conceal it, "There were plenty of us on Horizon."

"That's right," she says suddenly, leaning forward with interest piqued, "You're the one who came here on the rocket! You were all over the news for months!"

Now Winston laughs, "You're the only one on the news lately. For the past four weeks…"

Suddenly, the smile disappears from Lena's face, and Winston is cut off by the shock in her eyes.

"A month?" she says quietly, barely audible through the chamber's walls, "That's all it's been?"

Winston hesitates, and he pushes his glasses farther up his nose as he looks down, avoiding the desperation in her eyes for a moment; when he does glance up at her, it is almost as if she is pleading for someone to look at her, but she says nothing.

"You are suffering," Winston begins, sounding like a doctor with bedside manner, detached from the patient as if all that existed was the diagnosis, not the life it affected, "from a very unique condition called…"

"Chronal disassociation," she interrupts slowly, and Winston looks back to her for a second to see her half-heartedly smiling, the kind of smile when one is trying to be courteous instead of happy, "Dr. Tavington tried to explain it to me when they first put me into this… box."

There is a moment of silence before she continues, and Winston is reminded of how it felt when his life was regimented on Horizon, how he was confined to two rooms with one window and a view that never changed. Now Lena is the one in the cage.

"Has the Slipstream turned up too?" she asks hopefully.

Winston shakes his head 'no'.

"Poor old girl," she laments, "This whole thing is madness."

"You can say that twice," Winston agrees, his voice a growl, and Lena subtly, cautiously, leans away from the window for a moment, "Time is a funny thing isn't it?"

He gets up and goes back to his workbench as he speaks over his shoulder, retrieving some things from the scattered tabletop.

"We spend our whole lives thinking we understand time, day in, and day out. It was Einstein who discovered time is relative. And here most of us think it moves in one straight, constant line, when really…"

"It'a a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff," she interrupts, smiling brightly once again as Winston sits back down; her smile grows even brighter when she sees her company understands her reference.

"The Doctor was one of my favorite characters on the telly when I was a girl," she says as she starts to look disappointedly at her cell, "I never thought I'd see the day I was actually in a real life episode."

Winston suppresses a chuckle at the irony, and he begins fiddling with his latest design to make something productive of the time.

"Watcha got there?" Lena asks, leaning as far forward as she can to see the sleek, white contraption in the gorilla's massive hands.

"This?" Winston asks, holding up the device in question, "Your cure."

She jumps up as he finishes, excited and demanding.

"Well, what are we waiting for?" she yells, "Get it on me!"

"I'm afraid it doesn't quite work the way it should yet," Winston explains as the device limply hangs from his fingers; Lena disappointedly sits back down, her lower lip almost, but not quite, pouting.

"Well how much longer until it does work?" she asks, quite literally unable to wait any longer.

Winston does not have the heart to tell her that he honestly has no idea how to even begin to make it function. All he has so far is the idea and the shell; what he is showing her is no more than the house for the device itself. Instead, he smiles.

"I only have a few more tests to run," he lies, "but I have to wait a few hours before my tools cool down."

She sighs, her shoulders slouching.

"That could be a lot longer for me than for you."

Winston nods agreement and understanding before gesturing back to his hand.

"I call it the chronal harness. Mk. 1," he explains.

Lena smiles briefly.

"So you're to be my savior?" she asks, a playfulness in her voice, "My furry knight in shining white armor?"

Winston cocks an eye at her, and Lena's poker face only lasts so long.

"God, I sound ridiculous," she giggles after bursting out in laughter; she recomposes herself quickly, and goes on almost nostalgically, "You know, I made a point of actively avoiding being the damsel in distress. And here I am, a fighter pilot in the greatest Air Force in the world, waiting to be saved."

She sighs again, burying her forehead in one palm with a short chortle.

"Oh, this whole thing has turned into a nightmare."

Winston begins pawing at the harness in his hand, the size of Lena's chest fitting inside his palm, and his gaze still downward, he grumbles.

"Can I ask you something?"

Winston looks up to see Lena's head still in her hand save for one brown eye, watching him through parted fingers and waiting for the coming question.

"The pilot application for the Slipstream was volunteer only," Winston begins, "If you knew the risk involved, why sign up?"

Lena's answer is quick.

"If no one did anything because of the risks involved, nothing worth doing would ever get done!"

Winston admires the response for a moment, especially the passion in Lena's voice as she said it, before he goes on.

"I mean, really; why did you do it?"

"For the same reason you do anything," she shrugs, "Oh come on, you can't tell me you never did anything just to see if you could do it!"

Winston lets his hands fall into his lap, and his attention is seized by the girl on the other side of the glass, her hands gesturing furiously at nothing while she explained with a childlike wonder in her eyes.

"I know it failed, but imagine if it hadn't! Imagine how different the world would be! And I would have had a part in it!"

Winston nods appreciation.

"Alright, you got your question, now it's my turn," Lena says suddenly, once again grabbing the gorilla's ear, "Why are you all alone working in here, instead of working with the other scientists?"

Winston pretends to be adjusting the harness as he makes an answer, more for an excuse to avoid looking her in the eye than because he was doing anything to his creation.

"I was working with them, but they…" he trailed off, putting familiar memories of Horizon at bay as he chose words to minimize the context of his involuntary isolation, "They are very selective in who they believe in. That, and they thought I was being a disturbance to their work."

Lena, for the first time in a while, does not have a smile to respond with.

"So you set up shop in here? Alone?" she asks.

Winston nods.

"That's very awful of them," she says empathetically.

She pauses to herself before she continues.

"But I'm sort of glad they did," she says, drawing a somewhat defensive look from Winston before she explains, "If they hadn't I never would have gotten to meet you. You're very charming."

"Nor I you," Winston smiles back; he realizes now he has been mimicking her expressions since the conversation started.

"Do you still have the wristwatch you wore when the incident occurred? It should still keep time as you experience it. I'm curious as to how long this has gone on for you."

She holds her wrist out. The accident happened on March 25th 14:03 military time. Winston knows the date is May 3rd and the time is now 22:37. Lena's wristwatch says that the date is December 2nd, 13:55. No years are on the display.

Winston doesn't know what to say, so he settles on the only thing that makes any sense with a hint of empathy bouncing through his mind.

"You're very brave, you know."

Lena laughs, but this laugh is different. It is less friendly, like she is laughing at what he said instead of laughing because of what he said.

"Brave?" she scoffs as Winston's eyebrows dart up, "I'm terrified!"

"Every time I end up back here, there's cameras or some doctor with white teeth and clean hair watching me and I always smile, but I'm more scared than I've ever been in my entire sodding life! I don't understand why or how any of this is happening and I can't do a damn thing about it!"

"Lena," Winston tries to say consolingly, but she pays no heed; she's standing up now, pacing back and forth in front of the window like a caged lion, her hands balled fists at her sides.

"What if I never get better!"

"Lena, wait now," Winston tries again to no avail.

"What if I'm like this forever?"

"Lena," he tries a third time to the same effect.

"I wish I had died with the Slipstream! I would have been better than this!"

"Lena!" Winston roars suddenly, and Lena stops to look at him, her expression a tearful glare though not at him, and her breathing keeps its rapid pace.

"Do you believe in fate?" Winston asks, his fur beginning to come out of place; she looks at him bewildered, so Winston continues.

"Are you aware how astronomical the odds are of you even being here right now?"

She's starting to calm down now, at least becoming less angry.

"If you've gotten this far, then you're meant to make it all the way back. You're going to make it through this, and I'll make sure you do, with everything I have, I promise!"

She sits back down at the window, obviously sorry for her outburst but no less emotional. Winston keeps on.

"A friend of mine once told me to see things as they could be. I'll make what could be a reality. Just hold on. Keep holding on, and never let go. Because as soon as you give up hope… we've lost already."

Slowly, she looks up at him.

"Okay Winston," she nods, her voice cracking, "I believe you."

She waits before she leans forward, and says something that steals the gorilla's breath.

"I believe _in_ you."

Amber eyes grow wider for a moment, and Winston's heart skips a beat. It is the first time someone had said anything like that since he'd lost Harold, and it nearly stopped him in his tracks. Four words more profound than he remembers any being.

As he looks to Lena, her outline begins to buzz out of focus, as if she were on a fading television screen. She realizes what is happening at the same time Winston does, and she sighs as her head bows, wiping a tear from her eye before it falls.

She looks at Winston as his expression grows even more concerned, straight to fear, and one corner of her mouth draws up in a reassuring smile. Her eyes don't hide how terrified she really is. With two fingers, she touches her eyebrow in a small salute, and as she begins to fade away, her voice becomes a whisper.

"Cheers, love."

And then she is gone, leaving Winston to make good on his promise.

He neither sleeps nor eats until he sees that promise through.

And many days later, with red eyes, a stomach that had been sustaining itself off his body's tissue and hands clutching onto a completed chronal harness with its blue power core glowing, he barges into Lieutenant Lena Oxton's isolation chamber and straps the device onto her chest.

With bated breath, they wait and watch as slowly, her silhouette becomes less transparent and more solid, and weight returns to her body. They look into each other's eyes almost in disbelief when they think maybe, just maybe, it worked, Winston waiting to see if she fades away again and Lena waiting to see if he smiles or tears his hair out in frustration.

When both saw what they were looking for, they laugh in triumph together, Winston throwing his head back and his arms up and Lena jumping up and down shouting "Yes! Yes!" over and over again.

Then she hugs him; she jumps up and throws her arms around his neck and holds on like she's never letting go. She cries tears of joy into his fur, and Winston is so surprised he falls back onto his haunches, and slowly, cautiously, he brings an arm up to console her.

"Thank you. Thank you," she sobs over and over again, and Winston cannot decide if he wants to cry with her or just hug her back, like it's the first and last embrace of his life.

After minutes, she eases her grip, and pulls back enough for Winston to see her tear stroked face and her beaming smile. And at that moment, to this day Winston remembers the thought that crossed his mind.

There, sitting on the floor of the isolation chamber with tears soaking his neck and his stomach growling and his mind dreary and Lena still holding onto him, he thinks:

 _"_ _This_ is what Overwatch was meant to be."

Winston considers the chronal harness his greatest accomplishment, not because he bent the laws of space and time to his will, but because of the look on Lena's face when he gave it to her. That look said more than any song ever could.


	3. Matchsticks

The question to end all others on Horizon was, "How smart should these apes be by the time we're done?"

Test Subject 28 was the outlier; every piece of data, every statistic, every graph had his results in whatever test to compare the other subjects to. He was the one they used to see just how far they could go.

In many ways, Horizon was more than a colony. It was a space station, a communications relay, an observatory, the best funded lab known to man for all schools of science and it was home to dozens of the brightest minds of a generation.

It was the perfect place to see just how far Test Subject 28 could go.

When he was one, he had a language comprehension equal to an average American six year old. By the time he was two, he was talking.

It didn't matter that 28, and most of the test subjects, were able to communicate even complex thoughts in sign language; when the animals started speaking, people both on the moon and on Earth were struck silent.

28 was reading a book he had never read before, his hands gesturing along to the colorful text on the page in front of a video camera in order to showcase the progress Horizon had made in their cerebral augmentation endeavors.

"I do not like that Sam I am. I do not like green eggs and ham."

28 translated the words into signs perfectly, but the demonstration was not over until the comprehension test. Harold proctors the questions.

"What food does the character in the book not like?"

28 signs, "Ham and eggs."

"Good," Harold congratulated, and a sleeve of peanut butter is exchanged for a correct answer.

"Who does the character in the book not like?"

28 signs, "Sam."

"Sam!" Harold agreed confidently before turning to the camera, "Very good. As you can see, the progress is coming alo…"

"Sam."

Harold stopped midsentence, and slowly turned to look at 28; the other scientists observing looked as well, eyes wide and surprised. One of them laughed. Most stayed reverently silent, dumbstruck by the fact that they'd taught an animal to speak English.

28, upon seeing the reaction and probably hoping for another reward, again triumphantly says, in a voice too deep for his small frame, "Sam!"

28 looked proud as Harold smiled toothlessly, careful to keep from being taken for a threat, and turned back to laugh into the camera. And from there it was off to the races.

Anything any of the scientists could do on Horizon was fair game. They started with mathematics as the foundation, then biology and chemistry, then physics, then cyber, then theoretical physics. By the time 28 was seven, he was proving theorems that had baffled even the best of them for decades, and assisting in experiments of all sizes. Experiments in botany and chemistry, proofs of theories thought up by minds like Einstein and Hawking ,and a hand in the creation of the first fully autonomous artificial intelligence were all a part of 28's life on the moon.

Remarkable wasn't strong enough of a word, and awesome was too generic.

But in between the excitement of pushing the barrier, seeing how much an animal could attain, were little moments that made those closest to him stop and think. They saw the animal in him fade away, and he became more like them. They wondered what that made him. Animal or person? They wondered what to think; if he had a soul, who was superior? Were they equal? Did they have the right to regiment his life? In an argument for, Dr. Lee quoted Charlie Chaplain in "The Great Dictator". In an argument against, Dr. Ross cited "Evolution of a Species." Questions they never thought they would have to ask.

They watched as the way he saw the world changed; at first he looked through telescopes with curiosity, as if only to see what could be seen. But, eventually, he looked through the eyepiece the same way snipers look through their sights, with absolute focus, observing to learn instead of to appreciate. Before long, nothing was impervious to 28's scrutiny, not even the other scientists. But what he was most interested in was Earth. He would practically beg for stories; he wanted to know what that blue water he could see from space smelled like, or how wind felt, or how warm the sun could be on a summer day, or if the recordings of birds' songs Dr. Fairchild kept to help her sleep sounded the same as real birds on a crisp day.

The truth was in what he did when he wasn't working, how he held onto Pollux whenever he was alone, or how he always seemed to be trying to touch Dr. Harold Winston when they were together.

He always asked what home really was, if he was home on Horizon or on Earth. He asked why the other gorillas called him "the pet".

He asked if he really was a pet.

But perhaps the most profound thing he ever asked was why he didn't have a real name.

His name is Winston now, but he still remembers when he was a number. That's the blessing and the curse of genetic augmentation.

He remembers everything.

* * *

The Omnic Crisis is visible from space.

It's been three days since the fires started; first was St. Petersburg, then Rio de Janeiro, then Beijing. All across the world, simultaneously, population centers are being attacked. Now, half of the world is obscured by smoke, looking not unlike black, dark clouds from space. It doesn't take too much imagination to picture the extent of the damage, or the body count.

On Horizon, they're in the dark, except for what they can deduce. Attacks on cities, towns, any valid conglomeration of people. This wasn't war, civilians were being hunted the same as military. This was genocide against the human race.

They'd gotten reports of Omniums going rogue, churning out some sort of combat unit by the tens of thousands. Then they lost their communications satellites. All of them; they'd tried rerouting their signals to every space borne asset they had access to, but they were all offline, not even on radar.

It was Dr. Fairchild who hypothesized they had been destroyed. It made sense, from a military standpoint. If they were being attacked, their enemy would try to cut them off from each other, make coordination impossible. Easier prey.

The Omnics did have access to technology that could bring down satellites; some military organizations used them to manufacture warships, and most navies carried rail guns on at least some variant of weapons system. If the Omnics had just one of those, anything orbiting earth could be vaporized by a copper slug going Mach 12.

In all truth, on Horizon, they don't know what's going on. But the one thing they do know is what a bird's eye view of hell must look like.

The observatory floor is crowded for weeks. Every scientist on Horizon, when not doing daily duty, is trying to see if his hometown or her city is next, praying for _something_ to come through to their communications relay and tell them just how bad it is back home. It can't be much worse than it looks.

The days turn over, and it's more of the same. When Stuttgart becomes a bright, smoking light in the night, Doctor Fischer falls to her knees, and doesn't look away until the rotation of Earth pulls Germany out of view. When Sydney goes up like tinder, Doctor Williams beats his fist bloody against the wall, and Doctor Martin goes straight for the communications relay to no avail, trying to hail his wife and son in Liverpool for the next five hours. When New York's city lights go out out, and the fires take their place, it is the first time 28 has seen Doctor Harold Winston cry.

To 28 they are only cities, hollow names and pictures he had seen on holopads. But to the others, each city is a home. That is when his question is answered: where is my home? He doesn't have one. Horizon is a box, a school, a residence, and Earth is a beacon. But neither is home. What he does have is a family, and all around him, they are suffering. They are, all of them, Prince Paris, watching helplessly as Troy burns. The Omnics even make a fitting analogy for a Trojan horse; they'd thought the Omnics were to end wars, to bring the world together and finally forge equality after years of war and famine. And here, they put their families to the torch hundreds of thousands of miles away.

It was hard to imagine things could get worse, until they did. Horizon was safe from anything hitting it from the outside. They never expected danger to come from within their own walls. They expected even less for that danger to be something they made.

* * *

He used to ask the others about their names.

He wondered how they got them, what they meant, what kinds of traditions they carried. He cherished how much about someone he could learn simply by their name; country or culture of their parents, heritage, new money or old. He would meet a Rockefeller at a charity event, or a Freeman in Georgia, or a Kennedy or a Washington, and he would have a story before their first words even escaped their mouths.

There was a very pure poetry to even the simplest names.

Reinhardt Wilhelm. Reinhardt. It was amazing how much it sounded like two separate words, "Rhine" and "heart". The lionhearted warrior who fought for his homeland, the Rhineland, Germany. The more he said it, the better it fit.

Angela Ziegler. Angela. It was almost like bad poetry; the angel named Angela. But there was nothing in jest when the glow of her wings would rush through a veil of ash and smoke in a disaster zone or on a battlefield, the hum of her staff like a droning chorus, and lives thought lost were saved. It was sometimes hard to tell which name fit her better, Angela or Mercy.

Gabriel Reyes. Gabriel, the archangel. Reyes, Spanish for "kings". The angel of kings. He preferred the angel of death. Both were fitting; both were terribly beautiful.

Jack Morrison. One of the most common first names and the third most numerous surname among Caucasians in the United States. By his name, he was just like everybody else. But that was what made it so elysian, because he made his own fate. He started off just like everybody else in rural Indiana, a farmer's son with a love of country and family, and he made himself into a savior the world over.

But among them all, perhaps the most profoundly named member of Overwatch was Genji Shimada.

Winston knew Shimada the least of them all; he was a ghost, in that he was rarely around. What he knew of him at first were mostly rumors and assumptions gathered together from what of the reports weren't covered in black ink and whispers around the watchpoints. A Japanese mob boss' son fallen victim to fratricide, until their own medical wing brought him back for a grudge match against the Shimada Empire.

He was a man, if he was still human at all, of few words. He mostly worked alone, but when he wasn't working it was hard to coax him into a conversation. Like with the others, after a while, Winston asked him about his name.

Genji means "two beginnings."

* * *

28 looks through tears at hollow brown eyes staring blankly back up at him. He looks at a lab coat that used to be white, stained red. He looks at an observatory floor, what used to be his place of safety and discovery, where he would come to wonder at Earth and the stars, sticky in crimson.

He looks into the face of his friend and mentor, the closest thing he had ever had to a father, Dr. Harold Winston, dead. Dr. Harold Winston, murdered.

The other test subjects are still screaming in primal rage, that high pitched, feral howl of anger and raw passion, all over the base, but the observatory is empty. Empty, except for 28 and what is left of Harold Winston.

The air ducts had made a good hiding place to dodge the wrath of the gorillas seizing their liberty as it is often seized; with revolution, violent revolution, perpetrated by masses of the angry and mistreated with whatever weapons they could scrap together. The ducts had also made an excellent viewing area for the chaos all over Horizon, no matter how hard he had tried to look away. Mixed in with the angry primate screams are quieter, somehow more frightening screams of terror and horror.

Doctor Fairchild had her skull crushed in. Doctors Martin and Ross were beaten to death . Doctor Fischer's heart was pierced by a spear made from a piece of metal snapped off of the jungle gym in the recreational area and sharpened with teeth. Doctor Harold Winston was stabbed in the belly with a meal tray folded and rent into a shiv, then his neck was broken.

His family, murdered in front of him.

At first, he asks why. Why did the others revolt? Was it that they got tired of living like prisoners? Was it that they were sick of the genetic treatment, the needles, the tests? Did they get smart enough to wonder why they had to take orders, why they had to follow the rules, why they weren't allowed to breed or eat or play or sleep when they wanted to? Did it start hypothetical, and grow under the leadership of the ring leaders, the troop's alphas? Or did they just do it for fun, to see who was the alpha, the same reasons why they broke his arms on the jungle gym?

The rage builds. It starts in his stomach, and burns its way up to his throat, threatening to erupt, daring him to open his mouth and roar, because then it can all come out at once. It can fill his muscles and his heart and drive him into the halls for however much vengeance he can get until he dies too. But sitting on top of that anger, in the six inches of his throat above the burning, sits the saturating desire to go home.

But he doesn't have a home. Not anymore, not after today.

He never realized what he had until now; home for him was not a place, it was people. Home was at Doctor Harold's and all the others' sides. And now home is dead.

As he cries, whimpering on the observatory floor and clutching Dr. Harold Winston's hand, begging it to squeeze him back, the galaxy around him turns. Hours pass, and Earth comes into view, casting Dr. Harold Winston's lifeless face into the beautiful glow of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean.

28 looks up, a certain comfort in the view; there is a typhoon building in the Indian Ocean, and Madagascar is obscured by clouds. There is smoke in the north, near Tripoli, and in the east, by Casablanca. There, war rages just as loud and as hot as the rage in 28's heart. But there is still that last little bit of reservation that keeps him at Harold's side.

Off in the corner, Pollux is shredded. Tears mix in with blood. Whimpers become softer and still, through the window, Earth turns. It is constant, and big, and through the window it looks much closer than it actually is. And as 28 watches Harold's eyes get glossy, he remembers something he had heard when those eyes watched the Earth with him as it turned many years ago.

 _"Dare to see it for what it could be."_

And in that moment, everything _he_ could be became abundantly clear. He could be a walking eulogy. He could honor their memory. He could take what they had taught him and make a difference on the world they had all known as home, but not if he picks up a club and goes for payback.

That was his second beginning, in that moment, when he decided to carry his family with him as he went where he was terrified to go. It was his second birth, his new birthday, and so he needed a name. Not a new name; he had never had a name, only a number. His first name is no name, he needs a surname, a family name.

Only one name is perfect, only one name holds the poetry, the song, of this moment. It was always his family name, and now he makes it his own. It is simple, but it means the world.

Winston.


	4. People

Winston isn't a fool; he knows Overwatch was forged by war.

Of the original six agents, five were soldiers. The other 1/6th part of the team was their armorer, Torbjorn. He was Hephaestus, the anvil behind their swords and armor, and even he wasn't above swinging his hammer in a fight. Like every kid in the world, Winston has seen the holovids.

Reyes, Morrison and Liao up front behind cover as they trade shots with some Omnic monstrosity bristling with guns. Amari, covering them from somewhere far away and up high with her rifle. Reinhardt, bashing metal with that massive hammer, more often than not laughing while he does it. And Torbjorn, wherever he needed to be, either fortifying someone's position or flying through the air, ready to knock skulls himself.

So when he was finally initiated as an official agent of Overwatch, no longer just a recovered asset lingering around a lab, Winston knew what he could be in for. Nevertheless, he knew he could do more good in an Overwatch laboratory than a battlefield.

Winston was the last of the old breed; the final member inducted into the elite rankings of Overwatch agents before it was shut down; not Overwatch employee, not Overwatch asset or operative, Overwatch _agent_.

It was something he had wanted for a very long time.

But just because he was in didn't mean he was instantly a member of the family. Amari, Reyes, Morrison, Wilhelm, Lindholm: they were the family, a family of soldiers who had been through hell together and came out the other side with the demons crying for mercy. At least, that was how Winston saw them.

It's common knowledge to never meet your heroes.

Winston expected his first meeting with Strike Commander Morrison to go something along the lines of the propaganda, for him to be in his trench coat with a rifle in one hand, a recently saved child in the other with the burning wreckage of something terrible behind him, and for him to walk up and say something like, "Are you with us!?"

Instead, he was wearing what most of them wore in garrison, a skin tight grey and orange shirt tucked into black pants bloused over black boots. His hair is longer than he expected, the beginnings of whiskers beginning to crawl their way forward from the skin they had been shaved down to that morning. He was on the phone when Winston first entered the room beaming, but the Strike Commander was begrudgingly engrossed in whichever delegate or politician or bureaucrat was on the other end of the phone. His first words to Winston, as he hung up, were, "Welcome aboard," and a clap on the shoulder before he started disdainfully dialing the next number.

He expected Commander Reyes to slink up behind him from a shadow, his hood up and his voice menacing. Instead, he met him in the weight room, and his first words were neither menacing nor threatening. Insulting, yes.

"Jesus, are we a traveling circus now?"

He expected to meet Captain Amari on the weapons range, nailing targets a thousand meters out. Instead, he met her as he passed her between the R&D building and central HQ. Reinhardt wasn't in his power armor, posing in front of the sunset. He was in the mess hall, eating currywurst with a fork that was too small for his hands. Torbjorn wasn't hammering molten steel in a dark forge, creating Zeus' thunderbolt or Ares' new sword. He was at the coffee machine, grumbling about a lack of sleep.

Winston was utterly disappointed, until he had the sudden and profound realization that they were people. People capable of extraordinary things, yes, but no less people than anybody else. And in that moment he realized what someone could become when they were pushed. That people could be capable of amazing and terrible things.

The second time he met them it was a few days later at his induction ceremony with banners and certificates and medals and cake, along with all of the other agents, Tracer and Mercy and Genji and McCree. Things seemed more fitting then, but that first impression never went away.

The more he worked with them the more he learned about them, obviously, but what he cherished was that these little tidbits, these little quirks, were his. They all had their callsigns, their catchphrases, their battle rigs that looked identical to the action figures in their image little kids would buy; those were for the world.

If you asked any child in the streets of Dublin who Tracer was, they'd throw up a peace sign and feign an accent before saying, "Cheers love, the cavalry's here!" But very few people knew Lena Oxton's favorite movie was _My Fair Lady_. Do the same thing about Strike Commander Morrison in Chicago, and people might think of the statue in front of the museum in Numbani, but they wouldn't be able to tell you that Jack Morrison loved to stay up and look at the stars.

The celebrities of Overwatch belonged to anyone with access to the internet or a television, but the _people_ of Overwatch… you had to be in to get that.

Forged in war, yes. But as the years turned over Overwatch became more. By the time Winston was in, it was an organization capable of anything and everything and run by some of the most famous people on the planet.

They even made a calendar.

But then again, they were still warriors first.

On their first op together alone, Winston saw Amari shoot the gun out of a terrorists hand at 900 yards as he threatened to execute a hostage during a three hour standoff in Prague. He saw Morrison and Reyes breaching and clearing rooms like they were dancing, moving like water flows with incredible outbursts of precise aggression. He witnessed Torbjorn blow out the wheels on one getaway car, sending it crashing into a light pole, and Reinhardt, armor clad, launch the second car from the road with his hammer, laughing.

They were practically superheroes, and here they had chosen him to be one of them.

Winston had the science thing figured out, but fighting was never his forte. Combatives was an essential part of training, but Winston was always the one pulling his punches. Even his go-to weapon, the Tesla cannon, had started as a tool and then evolved into a weapon more aesthetically fitting than a gun. Angela understood, but Reyes didn't like it.

"One of these days monkey, you're gonna have to rip someone's face off, and Papa Gabe is gonna be _so_ proud."

Of all the people Winston scrutinized, trying to get under the hood and figure out, Commander Reyes was the hardest.

Gabriel Reyes was a walking paradox. Idealistic enough to think he could change the world, but realistic enough to know he was a dog chasing his tail. He dealt in absolutes, in total blacks and whites, but he was always at home in the moral grey area. He would kill one crooked politician or CEO, or the leaders of a drug cartel, in order to save thousands; in that way he was righteous, a hero. But as soon as shots came his or his team's way… the kill ratios for Blackwatch in firefights were almost supernaturally in Reyes' favor. He would kill dozens or even hundreds to save himself, or those few at his side. And in that way he was a punisher more than a savior.

Winston did not know him until after he was made the Commander of Blackwatch, but it didn't take a scientist of his prestige to deduce Gabriel Reyes' reasons for fighting. He fought so that the world might know peace, but it didn't take long to realize he probably couldn't live without war. It was his purpose, and he was good at it.

Everyone in Overwatch knew what he had done during the Crisis; it was his leadership that won the conflict for Overwatch, his courage and planning that won it the faith it needed for the UN to authorize a trial run. They were all strong, but without Reyes, they were all pulling in different directions. It was his conviction that focused them in, that showed them that it was about more than their home countries, and that they were a team. But, it was Commander Morrison that made them a family. So when the organization needed a head, Morrison was chosen.

However, it might take a scientist of Winston's prestige to deduce why Reyes did what he did in Switzerland. Even with his own mind, both for the logical courses of action and the illogical courses of human hearts, Winston never fully figured it out.

Reyes was there when the foundation for Overwatch was laid, as they all were, but he was unique in that, shortly after it became so famous and decorated and loved, he was removed. From there, he was a spectator, looking in from the outside as, over the years, it became more political. It became more about the bureaucracy, the funding, the agenda, and it was his job to handle the dirtiest side of all those dirty politics.

Winston doesn't think it was being forgotten in Commander Morrison's shadow that drove him crazy; all the glory in the world wasn't enough to break their friendship, even when it was shaky at best.

Winston knows it wasn't the years and years of combat and bloodshed either. In many ways, Reyes lived for those fights, those whip cracks of bullets snapping by and those loud, thundering explosions, and the mix between a game of chicken and chess it all became with him behind one piece of cover and whichever asshole was shooting at him behind another. He was a lion; he was not always safe or kind or gentle, but he was always passionate and dangerous and good. It was his nature. He believed moderation was for cowards and that the world wasn't enough to stop him. Reyes never pulled his punches. Sometimes, he wouldn't even dodge a fist just so he could taste blood before he started dealing it back out.

What got to Reyes was what got to Deadalus: watching as his creation plummeted from the sky until it became something impossible to reconcile, to justify, something so far from what it was originally supposed to be. _Overwatch, the people that saved the world, putting out hits on people and peoples' families it doesn't get along with._ Their enemies like weeds, it became hard to focus on an objective, so hard that the new objective became killing and the secondary objective became justifying it.

Winston knows from experience, the line between evil and necessary evil can only grow so thin.

Reyes was a walking paradox; idealistic enough to believe he could fight for something bigger than himself and everybody he knew, but realistic enough to know that to save the world it had to change, for better or for worse.

Every time Winston has thought about it, he's ended up here, with Reyes' black and white conscious torn in half and dancing around a campfire mocking him in his own mind. Save the world for a day or two and destroy Overwatch? Keep watching it bastardized?

Winston's leading hypothesis is that it drove him mad, so profoundly mad that the Gabriel they all knew died before any bombs ever went off. He had to resolve his paradox; he had to defy his nature. He had to choose between who he loved and his duty to protect the world from itself. So, he chose.

Winston knows it was a conscious choice; Reyes was too good otherwise. If he had tried, the world would have never known Blackwatch existed. But a careless fingerprint, or a paper trail not burned, or one minute piece of evidence left behind did most of the hard part of bringing down Overwatch for him. In a way, Overwatch was already dead when the Swiss Watchpoint went up; the fireball was more of a formality.

When the Petras Act first passed, Winston blamed Reyes; Winston hated Reyes' corpse, for years. But now, he finds it harder. He doesn't think Reyes was right; not by a longshot, but he does understand.

At least, he thinks he does.


	5. St Crispin's Day

To call Doomfist a lone wolf would be too generous. Wolves at least have some dignity.

He was a mad dog let off his chain, a violent criminal with no friends and warrants in seven countries. He was about every buzzword decent people couldn't stand, but he primarily targeted Omnics, especially anything having to do with Human-Omnic relations.

So what better target than Numbani?

The people of Nigeria called Akinjide Adeyemi "The Scourge" for good reason. He took Adhabu Ngumi's, the first Doomfist, moniker and gauntlet, his symbol of hope, and he corrupted it. He made it into a weapon of destruction instead of a tool for salvation. And that's just what he wrought: unadulterated destruction.

It was Unity Day, about 11 in the morning, when he started leveling towers. Textbook terrorism; no demands, no hostages, no warning. Just an attack aimed at an idea and intended to cause mass casualties.

The news broadcasts covering the parades and music celebrating coexistence were interrupted by the sound of an explosion, and a subsequent shock wave of red, voltaic energy. As the people started screaming and running, the cameras panned up to see the Okoya Building collapsing down onto them and the ash and debris filling the streets with an oncoming grey wall like a pyroclastic flow. Just as the screams were cutting off, replaced with the sounds of groaning steel and cracking earth, the network was hacked.

Winston remembers looking up at the monitor in the lobby of headquarters in horror, dozens of his peers gathered around him doing the same, as Adeyemi shakily filmed himself yelling into the camera.

"This city is a symbol of decadence, of complacence, of cowardly tolerance with our enemy! Millions died at their hands, and now you break bread with them! I wield the Savior's gauntlet, I fight for what he died for! I destroy the Omnics, and those who side with them! Our enemies will be made to ash! Come and stop me, you will join them in death! Numbani is mine! Send your heroes! I'll be waiting!"

Cut to black.

* * *

Overwatch's QRF is quicker than most, in the same way their dropships are quicker than most. It's just over an hour later, and the drone of the engines is almost blocked out by the vessel's thick, armored walls. It's amazing, how a craft so much like a flying tank could move so fast; they're already almost to the Nigerian border.

It's a large aircraft, large enough to fit each of the Overwatch agents inside its hold, and Reinhardt is wearing his armor. They hadn't had much prep time before takeoff, so everyone is gearing up, each in their own way now, the clicks of bullets being loaded into magazines almost thunderous in the tense air. At least, it's tense to Winston.

His mind is racing, analyzing everything he can see and even more things he can't. His armor fits the same way it always has, but he swears he can feel all of its gaps now more than ever, and he keeps imagining how badly it might hurt if some bullets find those gaps. So, he calculates the angles shooters would least likely be able to defeat his armor from, and commits it to memory to turn away from any oncoming bullets so they may be caught by the alloy he's encased in rather than his own flesh.

He knows his Tesla cannon works, that its power source is reliable and its design is sound, but he keeps picturing the trigger compressing and nothing coming out when it matters. So, he calculates the projected time it would take to fix the most likely malfunctions, and runs over the components in his mind.

But despite the fact that he is about to embark on his most crucial mission yet, his mind keeps wanting to stray away from what he should be focusing on. Memories of a birthday party, a scene from a bar, a flashback to a hillside with endless stars above keep barging into his pre-combat checks. He can't get them out of his head, no matter how hard he's focusing on everything of substance. He knows he should want them far away, but he wants them as close as he can have them.

He's looking around the hold now, trying to find a friendly pair of eyes to put him a little bit more at ease, but the throbbing of the engines are sounding more and more like war drums. Reinhardt is faceless now, his scarred eye concealed behind his helmet; it's easy to imagine him cool as ice beneath his armor, not nervous at all. Genji Shimada is the same way, but as he keeps dragging a whetstone across his katana's blade, the eerie metallic *shink* it makes somehow getting louder, his visor looks more narrow than it has before. Angela is adjusting her suit, tugging on pauldrons and squirming so it fits right while Torbjorn's rivet gun is finally holstered. Commander Morrison is adjusting his body armor too, the same way Captain Amari does directly across the aisle from him. They both are fully loaded and cocked; there is an edge to their faces that isn't normally there, no expression except for the eyes, which said too much to be interpreted. Even Lena has her war face on; when Winston's eyes meet hers, she forgets momentarily about her blasters, and smiles at him. He smiles back, but he's very sure she can tell he's faking it. Hers, on the other hand, is as picture perfect as always.

Winston imagines Commander Reyes and Jesse doing similar things with more guns in the other aircraft just now forming up off their wing; he can see them through the ventral window, leveling off with about twenty meters of air between the two wingtips.

It's very clear this is a joint op, all hands on deck with the best and brightest. There is a fleeting relief in knowing they will have some backup with Blackwatch, but that relief quickly leaves in the wake of another realization.

 _"_ _Blackwatch is supposed to be in Libya."_

If they were called off an op and rerouted to Numbani… Winston shudders, thinking how bad the situation must really be.

Without trying, Winston's mind once again decides to reminisce, back to the hillside in the Swiss Alps at night with Commander Morrison naming the constellations and Lena laughing louder than everyone else when Commander Reyes calls him Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and he shakes his head to refocus as he hears the same voice that named the stars coming from the front of the hold, each word echoing in his earpiece.

"Listen up!" booms Commander Morrison's voice, putting any fiddling with gear to an abrupt end, "We've got all the intel we're gonna get, so consider this a briefing!"

He takes his hand away from his earpiece for the first time in a while, and all eyes rest eagerly on him, that blue trench coat looking much smaller than it did in the holovids.

"HVT has been positively identified as Akinjide Adeyemi, call sign Doomfist. He is in possession of a heavily modified and augmented version of the kinetic gauntlet wielded by Adhabu Ngumi. So far, he has most of downtown Numbani's business center in his hand. Most noncombatants have been evacuated but command thinks there may still be innocent people near the AO, so check your targets."

Everything seems like an acronym of an acronym, and Winston is somewhere between translating and memorizing what had been said when more voices start resounding through the cabin.

"Only one target, sir?" asks Tracer without delay, shouting so her voice could be heard over the engines; she forgets everyone can hear her at normal volume through their earpieces, and Winston's ears are ringing for the next few seconds.

"Negative," comes the quick response, a disappointment in the answer as everyone realizes the stakes are exponentially higher than they'd hoped, "Nigerian police, first respondents, and military on scene have confirmed that Adeyemi is working with a heavily armed and well trained paramilitary force numbering anywhere from a few platoons in size to an entire battalion. Friendlies have been unable to confirm numbers, but they've been getting ambushed from concealed fighting positions on street level and in the buildings every time they've tried to push through. Reports are that they have downtown cordoned off, and every half hour since 11:15, Adeyemi has brought down another skyscraper."

Winston checks his wristwatch, the digital numbers inlaid into his gauntlet. Three buildings leveled so far, and a fourth about to come down, if the pattern held.

Winston looks around again, his mind wired as he calculates every factor, every miniscule detail, a supercomputer walking on its knuckles.

 _The AO is primarily comprised of a modern post-industrial urban environment. Skyscrapers, smaller buildings, sewer tunnels, roads; all possible infiltration/exfiltration routes as well as areas of varying cover and concealment. Shields will be crucial to survival. Areas of maximum vulnerability will be during airborne infiltration and any time spent on ground level, especially on the roads. Stealth is preferable. If not attainable, breaking contact and persisting towards Adeyemi is the next best option._

"Our priority should be ground zero," Mercy says suddenly, authoritatively, more of a statement than a suggestion, "There could be survivors."

"If we don't stop Adeyemi first, even more people will die," comes the Commander's response; there is a torment in his voice, and Winston knows why. It's his job to be detached, to do his duty and follow orders, but he wants, more than anything, to get those people out. This is the moral grey area of assigning worth to life, of making the impossible calls, and living with the consequences. Looking into Commander Morrison's face, Winston learns the haggard expression of a man who has become begrudgingly used to words like 'collateral'.

"Once we're sure no more buildings are coming down, our priority becomes disaster response," announces Reinhardt, making an unspoken peace between the circumstances and enlightening everyone on what their true purpose is. As if that point wasn't clear enough, Genji Shimada clarifies as a formality.

"Commander, with what degree of prosecution are we to treat the target?" his robotic voice asks.

"Use lethal force on sight."

 _We're a kill team;_ Winston thinks to himself _we have Blackwatch, after all._

Torbjorn is next to speak, pressing for any more information he… they all… can get.

"Any identification on this paramilitary group, Commander?" he pries, his accent thicker as he raises his voice.

"Nothing confirmed," Commander Morrison growls; the way he looks down betrays him, but to those that knew him best, just the tone in his voice was enough.

"Quit dancing around it, Jack. What do we know?" crackles the very angry voice of Commander Reyes over the comms.

Winston tries to answer himself, but he never lets the words out.

 _Adeyemi working alone? Possible, but not likely. His known client base is incapable of organizing an attack of this scale. Vishkar? More likely. The potential funding is there, and so is the motive. Intelligence has brought up more and more connections, albeit distant connections, between Vishkar assets and less reputable characters of late. It' always cheaper to destroy than it is to build, and if Numbani is to remain a city of the future, it's likely Vishkar will get the clean up contracts once Adeyemi's tantrum is shut down. If they let him off the chain, doubtless, it'd be a net gain._

The Strike Commander does not reply to Reyes right away, and he glares as he makes an answer.

"Intel is they wear a black uniform and full head protection with red optic lenses. Body armor, military grade small arms and, we're being told, AA capability."

Commander Reyes' response is immediate.

"It's Talon!" he growls, an eagerness in his voice.

 _"Maybe more than Talon,"_ thinks Winston before he realizes it doesn't really matter; they have a target who is actively massacring a peaceful people, and he must be dealt with. They why's can wait.

"We don't _know_ that, Gabe," Commander Morrison replies only for the voice of his counterpart to come right in over the radio; the static cannot hide the disdain in his tone.

"It's enough for me, and it should be for you too!"

"I think he's right, Jack," Captain Amari says, the wheels visibly turning as she holds her rifle like a child, "Adeyemi couldn't get the funding or the infrastructure to pull something like this off on his own, and he couldn't improve the capability of the kinetic gauntlet without help. Who else has those kinds of assets that can also slip through Overwatch's and Blackwatch's radar?"

One glance and Winston knows everyone in the ship is in agreement; the dots are connected, and they are making a very ugly picture. Talon they know is a for sure culprit. It had played its hand, and Doomfist was its ace in the hole. This attack is everything Talon represents; clearly anti-Omnic, devastating in effect and professionally executed. But this attack is different; it is loud and public, not secretive and from the shadows as it had always been before, and with the way Atlas News had been hacked, it sure seemed like Adeyemi was calling Overwatch out.

" _Send your heroes! I'll be waiting!"_

He wouldn't be waiting much longer.

"These are the bastards that got Lacroix," Commander Reyes growls over the radio, his voice startlingly clear, "It's time for some fucking payback!"

This just became more than a mission. This just became personal, exactly what Morrison didn't want to happen on the outside, but in his eyes, Winston sees the Strike Commander wants payback just as badly as Gabriel. Maybe more.

* * *

As they cross the Nigerian border, Winston completes his third meticulous gear check. On their approach vector to Numbani, his mind momentarily fixates on the people in black he imagines the size of ants so far below them.

Talon is antimatter; it exists to destroy, to undo peace and harmony. In many ways, its motives are as shrouded as the organization itself, but they are coming more and more into the light with each encounter. To put it simply, Talon ignores the peace treaty struck between man and machine, the same way they ignore every international convention outlawing crimes against humanity.

Winston never knew the Lacroix family, at least not well. The tragedy that befell them happened after he'd come to Earth, but well before he officially joined Overwatch. He knew of them, but he didn't know much more than Amelie and Gerard's names, or their portraits next to identical caskets at the funeral in the cathedral at Notre Dame. But that didn't matter; he'd seen the looks on the other agents' faces at that memorial, the agents that _did_ know them, not as friends but as family.

Winston has heard the stories; stories from the rescue team that pulled Amelie from Talon's grasp after being tortured for months, stories from the response team that found Gerard in his bed after he'd been murdered, and stories, more like rumors, that Amelie, who'd been presumed dead, went back to Talon. It would almost be preferable if she had been in the empty casket next to Gerard's, sprinkled in holy water and covered first in white linen, then in black cemetery dirt.

By the looks on the others' faces now, the pain that loss had caused is still far from gone. Winston can feel that pain slowly turning into rage all around him, and it is equal parts humbling and unsettling.

Suddenly, a loud groan from the back of the hold rips Winston out of his thoughts, and his eyes dart over to see the rear cargo ramp of the dropship lowering. The cold thin wind rushes into the cabin, and Winston, seated closest to the ramp on the aircraft's starboard side, leans forward to look at the Earth below.

They are over the golden savanna now, only a few hundred feet off the ground. He can see gazelles leaping as they run from the aircraft's shadow. Off their wing, Blackwatch's aircraft still hovers, keeping perfect pace with them; the second aircraft's ramp is down too, and Winston knows they are approaching their target. His mouth is dry, and he feels like he is about throw up. If not for the cold wind, he may have already. The lurching of the aircraft and the confined space is making him claustrophobic, and he is reminded of the days he spent in a cramped space module. Not pleasant memories.

As the aircraft speeds onward, the smell of the air begins to change. At first Winston does not recognize it, but before long he realizes the scent is that of smoke. It isn't wood smoke; it smells more rotten than that, and it leaves a burn on the insides of his nostrils.

Next, the air outside the cabin grows hazy.

Winston feels the aircraft pitch and roll into a turn, and the grasslands give way to concrete and glass far below. What Winston sees stays with him for years.

Numbani is a total war zone.

Ash fills the streets like a blanket of new fallen snow, burning cars and fire trucks form a ring of fire along Talon's perimeter, and piles of rubble stories high take the places of buildings all throughout downtown. The streets around the business center are barren except for abandoned vehicles, and the streets away from the attack's epicenter are filled with people, a mass exodus departing the city behind them. Through the haze of downtown, Winston can see the bright orange streaks of tracer rounds being exchanged in a firefight between Talon and what has to be the Nigerian military. By the looks of it, the Nigerians are in crossfire, and more bullets are coming in than going out.

Through his communicator, Winston hears Commander Morrison address their pilot.

"Circle the city and land us close to the disaster zone! Then pull back and establish a holding pattern 2 clicks out! Be ready to provide CAS within one minute if I call it in!"

Winston hears the words like they're from a dream. He's seeing hell through his eyeglasses; he swears he can see bodies down there, crimson outlined silhouettes against the grey ash. He sees military gun trucks on fire, entire convoys stopped in their tracks as they tried to get to those trapped in the rubble.

"Where do you suppose Doomfist is?" he hears Jesse over the radio.

He sees his watch blink to forty-five minutes past noon. His hair stands up with a static tingle as he sees the red shock wave of electricity expanding out from a single point at the base of the Jammeh Building downtown. He sees it come down in slow motion, slanting as it collapses onto itself then buckles into three pieces, a black cloud rising up to swallow it as sixty-three stories and who knows how many people disappear.

"I'll give you three guesses, cowboy," Reyes sneers, static in his ear.

Winston sees it all in suspended animation, watching as if he weren't really there, as if he were seeing it all on a screen like millions around the world.

They continue circling, coming completely around the city once, before they come in for a landing. The minute and a half it takes them to descend and maneuver feels like a lifetime. For a moment, before he chases it away again, the memory comes back, a memory of candles on a cake and his friends gathered around. Winston looks back at those same friends who had been there, almost unrecognizable; those that aren't wearing masks might as well be, their smiles replaced with warriors' scowls. Ten of them between the two dropships, going up against a small army on their own.

 _We few..._

"You alright big guy?!"

He turns to his right, to Lena, and looks into her eyes, a deep hazel even behind the tint of her goggles. It hits him all over again as he comes back into the present: the ash, the smoke, the building that just came down.

"I think so," he stammers as his stomach turns over.

"Don't worry!" she says over the engines, nothing hindering their roar with the cargo ramp open, "We stick together, we'll get through this! Numbani needs us!"

She smiles briefly as a reassurance, but Winston knows it's more than that. He feels the same way, fulfilled. He is terrified, claustrophobic in a government funded air taxi with machine guns over a burning city whose current heavily armed denizens are no doubt watching them come in and preparing to hit them as they are the most vulnerable. But, he knows what he is doing is right, that it is _worth_ doing, and he knows that is more than some people ever get. Numbani needs them, the world needs them, and so they answer.

 _We happy few..._

They're slowing down now, and bleeding altitude even faster. The jump is coming, and they are ready for it.

"Tell the Nigerian military to hit as many points along the perimeter as possible!" Commander Morrison tells their pilot, "The diversion will buy us some room!"

Winston looks around the cabin at his closest friends one last time before he hears the pilot's voice in his earpiece.

 _For he who sheds his blood with me today..._

"Incoming!"

He feels the explosion, he does not hear it. The last thing he feels before going black is the turbulent gut-wrenching sensation of spinning.

* * *

The smell of smoke is sweeter now, not pungent but pleasing. Through the silence, a song is being sung, quietly at first, but as it reaches its high notes, he realizes who is singing. Reinhardt is the loudest; under his voice he hears Lena, only slightly more on key, then Angela in perfect pitch. He can hear Commander Morrison too, and Jesse and Torbjorn, but their baritone voices are barely registering over the others.

He remembers the cake, under baked and with too few candles; it had Skippy in the batter. He remembers how Commander Reyes didn't sing, but was the first to cut into the cake. He remembers opening his gifts. First a massive flannel shirt, from Jesse. Then a huge pair of tan jeans, from Commander Morrison. A giant pair of boots from Reinhardt, a sweater from Torbjorn, a black hoodie from Reyes and a leather jacket from Lena.

By the time he's done, he has a full wardrobe.

When he looks up to the others, no words to say, they all smile.

"Lena said you told her you weren't feeling like you fit in," Angela says, her blue eyes brighter than her smile somehow.

"So, we went down to Big & Tall. Gotcha some clothes to get'cha out in the world like a regular ol' Joe," explains Commander Morrison, his arms crossed and his smile subtle.

"You do like it, don't you love?" Tracer asks.

"It's perfect," Winston says, a smile finally breaking on his face.

"Good," Commander Reyes says, smiling wryly, "Now get changed, we're taking you out. I'm gonna show you a good time, _mono."_

Winston does not move while the others head for the door, all of them laughing at something Jesse had said, but Winston stays where he is, looking down at what his friends had done for him. They're allowing him to be like them; they're allowing him to be normal, and that is something he has never had. That's something he had always wanted. Not a shirt and a jacket, not clothes, but simply to belong, to be treated like a person, like a human being.

It is the best gift he has ever received, and as he watches them all, smiling and laughing with arms around one another's shoulders, one word comes to mind.

 _Home_

It's a few minutes before Commander Morrison comes back for him.

"Let's go!" he calls out, a friendly impatience in his voice.

But then the world begins to swirl. Other sounds bleed through the walls: thunder, breaking glass, car alarms and indistinct shouting.

Commander Morrison's yell becomes more urgent.

"Let's Go! Move!"

The walls fall away, and the storm outside becomes deafening. Gunfire, that sharp whip crack of bullets snapping by, and the menacing sound of their impact against concrete and steel. Winston feels a weight against his chest, and his ribs feel like they're half an inch from snapping. He's short of breath, able to breathe but unable to breathe deeply. The sweetness in the smoke flits away.

"WINSTON!" he hears Tracer's voice yell, and it is as if someone suddenly turned on the lights.

* * *

Winston wakes up like he'd drifted to sleep unwillingly; suddenly, and with quick breaths as he looks around. The blur of a grey world around him is interrupted by streaks of orange light. Kneeling next to him, behind a concrete slab, he makes out orange legs, a brown torso interrupted by an orb of light blue.

"Winston!" he hears Lena's voice say, and he feels her hands lightly slap his cheek, "Get up, love!"

There is an abnormal urgency to her tone, and even behind her visor her eyes are wide. A whip cracks above them, and after she ducks, Lena empties her blasters over the top of her piece of cover at some unseen target.

"Whole thing's gone bollocks!" she yells as she comes back down to him, "We need you in this fight!"

He sees the others hazily, taking cover all around him. Reinhardt shepherds them, his shield up and his hammer in one hand as he absorbs the incoming fire, those few rounds that make it through his shield bouncing off his armor to no effect in a shower of sparks. He cannot see Genji or Torbjorn, or Reyes and Jesse. Commander Morrison and Ana are trading rounds with whoever is shooting at them, firing up and down the street. Angela is trying to stop the pilot's bleeding, her Valkyrie suit more red now than white; she is near frantic, something that only happens when she is close to losing a patient. The noise is deafening; over the gunfire, he can barely hear Commander Morrison.

"COME ON! RETURN FIRE!" he yells, the muzzle of his own rifle lighting up his face, "WE NEED AIR SUPPORT, NOW! DANGER CLOSE ON CRASH SITE ALPHA!"

Suddenly, a rocket propelled grenade darts past Reinhardt's head and explodes in the rubble by Winston; Tracer covers her head as the blast throws her forward, and the world goes silent under the whine of Winston's ringing ears. He goes to displace, baring his teeth as his heartbeat throbs in his temples, but finds he cannot move.

He's pinned under a wing panel and no small amount of concrete and re bar, their drop ship's nose buried in the ground floor of a bank just behind him and a groove of torn up asphalt showing right where it'd come down. The shredded engine and blown up wing just outside where Winston's seat had been makes it obvious they had been shot down.

"We have to get out!" yells Captain Amari between firing rounds, "We're suppressed here!"

"We've got heavy rain inbound in thirty seconds!" replies Morrison as he ducks down to reload, rounds chipping away at his cover.

"That may not be soon enough!" bellows Reinhardt as he lowers his shield and swings his hammer along the ground, the pulse rippling forward, down the street, to obliterate one of the cars their enemy is using as cover.

Winston regains his all at that moment, and grimaces as he braces his arms against the rubble pinning him in place. He leans against it, then presses, then pushes with everything he has, and only then does it budge. He pushes hard, bullets pinging off the hull of the aircraft folded around him; he screams with effort, the piercing shriek of a silverback, and he is free.

And then his world becomes the inside of a violent snow globe.

The second drop ship, the Blackwatch vessel, speeds in from a side street, its wings all but scraping the buildings on its sides as ash spirals in its jet wash. Its engines oscillate and it drifts, like a race car doing a power slide, coming to a sudden stop directly over the crash site, and Winston sees the Gatling guns in the nose spin up as the down blast from the engines throws up the settled ash like a blizzard. It starts as a hum, then a whir, then a roar louder than thunder and it's raining hot shell casings. A stream of tracers, like a dragon's breath, sweeps the street and the buildings they are taking fire from with devastating effect; cars catch fire, glass shatters, anything combustible explodes and the incoming fire stops as red Blackwatch bullets ricochet off the pavement, arcing towards the horizon as they continue on like fireworks.

Winston moves to cover Tracer with his body, the singeing rounds taking no effect on his hard armor, and he sees a rope drop down from above. Commander Reyes and Jesse fast rope down. Mercy ties the wounded pilot to the same rope that had delivered their Blackwatch counterparts, and giving it a tug, she is lifted to the sky.

The drop ship peels away, and the ash begins to settle again. In the absence of ear splitting noise, the sudden silence is almost more frightening.

"Let's move!" Reyes roars as his boots splash in the flaky ash, and he is already stalking down the street towards Doomfist's last known location, Jesse close behind.

At a trot, they fall in on Reyes, but not before Tracer blinks out from underneath Winston and throws a pulse bomb on the drop ship's instrument panel.

Formed up, they move on their target, leaving nothing behind at the crash site except brass, a hollow burning air frame, and their footprints in the slowly falling ash.

* * *

There's a rhythm to Reinhardt's movement as he leads them down an alleyway, an unwavering beat with each footstep as they press on, looking for Doomfist. Behind Reinhardt is Morrison, then Reyes and McCree. Angela is in the middle, by Lena and Torbjorn. Genji hovers near her, his visor scanning back and forth, up and down the buildings, his fingers tapping on the handle of the smaller of his swords. Winston brings up the rear with Captain Amari, watching their backs.

It feels like they're in a snowfall without the cold; the ash is whiter here. Through the drifts, in the shadows, Winston swears he can see movement. Every shadow is a Talon agent stalking them, every sound is a gun cocking, every sway in the air by the wind, in his mind, is Doomfist, grinning, making good on his promise.

 _I'll be waiting._

Off in the distance, machine guns rattle in bursts, not unlike distant calls of birds or the chirping of insects. In the quiet, Winston's mind once again wanders beneath the tension.

He sees Jack Morrison turn and sweep an overpass with his rifle as they cross a side street, his eyes cold and glossy in focus, and he remembers how those blue eyes would brighten a room when he rarely laughed, or how they could silence a room with a glare. He sees Reinhardt silent in focus, the metal in his gauntlets all but grinding at the handle of the hammer in his grip, and recalls his bellowing laugh, the pride in his triumphant voice telling stories. He sees Jesse's lips wrapped around a cigar, but thinks of those same lips drawling along to the script of _The Outlaw Josey Wales_. He sees how Captain Amari holds her rifle, almost cradling it, and thinks of how she holds Fareeha, the same way. He sees Torbjorn's turrets, compacted down and latched onto his belt, but he thinks of his family waiting for him back in Sweden. He sees Reyes move, and thinks of how he danced at the bar on his birthday all that time ago, fluid, effortlessly, knowing what to do far before he ever got there, thinking only of his partner.

 _"New intel,"_ he hears Commander Morrison say over the comms, _"Satellite imagery shows Talon concentration on the Aetria Corporate building. They think that's the next target."_

And so they go.

They cordon the building, surrounding it and cutting off any avenues of escape. Winston is at a blocking position; he can't see any hostiles, as he is a block and a half away down a likely retreat path, but he hears Captain Amari over the radio calling targets from her perch in some building with line of sight.

 _"Twenty-five targets, plus one HVT. Small arms mostly, and one machine gun team. We will initiate on my shot."_

When the shooting starts, Winston hears the action, he doesn't see it.

But that changes soon after.

 _"Winston, Doomfist slipped through! He's headed your way!"_

When he sees him, Doomfist is sprinting down the street toward him alone, looking back over his shoulder at the gunfire behind him. Akinjide Adeyemi is a specimen of the new world's black market. His hulking muscles are far too large to be natural, either the product of banned steroids or some underground surgical implant. He wears military pants and boots, and is shirtless under his body armor. His exoskeletal suit reinforces his bones; it looks like the suit is secured directly to his body, drilled right into him at key points of movement. He leans to the arm his gauntlet is on as he moves, its weight pulling him with every movement.

"Stop!" Winston yells as he jumps into the street in front of Adeyemi, "You're under arrest!"

His brown eyes snap forwards, and they fill with fire. Winston levels the Tesla Cannon, and as it starts whirring, Doomfist jumps, voltaic crimson building around his kinetic gauntlet. Winston lets loose a beam of electricity as Adeyemi soars down at him, but it does nothing; Winston rolls out of the way at the last minute, and the Doomfist gauntlet craters the pavement where he was standing.

Before Winston can even recover, Doomfist's shoulder is in his stomach, and he is being tackled to the ground. All of Commander Reyes' fighting lessons come back to him, and Winston rolls, throwing Adeyemi off of him and getting to his feet quickly. But again, before he can reacquire and fire, Adeyemi is upon him.

Akinjide Adeyemi fights like a bull, with reckless abandon, all offense and no defense. He even roars, yelling with each strike and breathing in grunts.

Winston tries to counter Adeyemi's next hay maker, but can't get out of the way. Luckily it wasn't a fully charged strike; it only dents his breastplate, and throws him across the street, through a window, and halfway through a wall. He gets back to his feet with a groan, dizzy and in pain masked with adrenaline, before he jumps back out into the street.

He lands on his knuckles in the ash, and sees Adeyemi on the opposite curb, raising his arms tauntingly at him.

"Call yourself an agent!" he yells through the smog, "You belong in a zoo!"

Winston shakes his head, almost laughing; he's jeering at him, just like in every superhero movie where the hero and villain finally throw down. For a moment, he forgets his ribs' pain, and the fading gunfire back at the Aetria Corporate building. For the sake of banter, Winston makes a response.

"Prison's not so different than a zoo," he shouts back, "You'll have to tell me what it's like."

For the first time, Winston sees Adeyemi smile, his pointed chin and under bite practically jutting out towards him.

"And who is going to bring me in?" he laughs before pointing, "You, Monkey?"

Winston growls a low growl, coming from the nerve he'd struck.

"I'm not a monkey," he snarls under his breath with a glare, and he pushes his glasses farther up his nose.

And with that, Adeyemi charges and Winston beats his chest, then triggers his thrusters. Ash flies up behind him as he shoots across the street, and his massive arm close lines Doomfist midair, sending him flailing into a light pole. It folds around him, and clatters to the ground in a shower of sparks.

Before Doomfist can get up again, Winston grabs him by a leg, and with a roar, throws him across the street to cave the side of a car in; its alarm resounds through the city, until Doomfist, enraged and bleeding from his nose and mouth, crushes the engine compartment.

Winston smiles, satisfied. It felt good, hitting back. But as Adeyemi stalks back across the street towards him, he realizes he's only pissed him off more, and the smile fades.

 _Tough bastard._

Winston fumbles with his Tesla Cannon, trying to charge it up for an EMP, but as it's getting ready to fire, Doomfist swings. Winston ducks the blow, the wind from the strike blowing his hair, and he tries to counter. Adeyemi steps around Winston's simian fist, and puts him in a hold from the rear.

Adeyemi throws him; Winston recovers in flight, landing on his feet, but he drops his Tesla Cannon. Doomfist gets to it first, and crushes it in his gauntlet, snapping it in two. Winston roars at him, and pounds the ground. Adeyemi smiles again, and Winston thinks of a lion.

"Why are you fighting?" Adeyemi says, pointing, "They are only Omnics."

They're starting to respect each other as adversaries; they slowly circle each other now, neither giving ground but neither ready to attack quite yet.

"You're an idiot if you think I'm fighting just for them," comes Winston's response.

Adeyemi grows angrier, and he turns so the kinetic gauntlet is behind him; Winston doesn't see it start glowing red, charging up.

"You'll _die_ just for them! Just like thousands have before you!" Adeyemi says with scorn, and his voice cracks a bit as he yells, "Or have you forgotten!?"

"No one has!" Winston yells back, throwing his arms as he gestures, "This city was supposed to honor the dead, to put the crisis behind us!"

Adeyemi bares his teeth, and his eyes narrow as his tone gains an edge. It comes forward as a breath, a hiss, betraying the wrath inside him.

"You really believe that?" he asks, almost like he pities Winston, like he knows something he doesn't.

Adeyemi doesn't wait for a response; he rushes Winston, dodges his massive hand as it comes at his head, and connects against his chest armor with a devastating uppercut. The sound is like an explosion, as if everything rushed into the point of impact before rushing outwards in a crash of energy. Again, Winston flies through the air and through a window across the street, but this time he doesn't stop at one wall. He goes all the way through, crashing through the windows on the opposite side of the building, and careening into the street.

The pain is the kind where you can't breathe, where even that simple movement of the diaphragm sends jolts of paralyzing hurt all over. Winston doesn't even groan, because even that would make it hurt more. He tastes blood in his mouth and feels it going down the back of his throat. If his lower ribs weren't broken before, they are now; Winston can feel the sharp prod inside of him, and one of his arms is bent slightly the wrong way.

He comes back slowly. He's lying on his side at the mouth of an alleyway. He looks up, and can see the hole he'd made as he went through the office building above. His glasses are gone, lying with cracked lenses a few feet away. He's able to lift himself to his knees, bracing himself upright gingerly on his knuckles.

Adeyemi suddenly materializes over him, hardly a silhouette; Winston's vision is blurry, and he's seeing more stars than flakes of ash. Adeyemi is breathing heavily, and he raises his gauntlet slowly over Winston, its shadow consuming his face. But, the blow never falls. Instead, Adeyemi looks up, down the street, and smiles ominously.

Adeyemi walks away, and his gauntlet's hum grows louder. Winston looks down at his wristwatch; it's 1:15, thirty minutes after the Jammeh building came down.

"How many people did you kill today already?" Winston manages to whimper as he stumbles, trying to stand back up.

"Not enough!" Adeyemi yells back, his gauntlet beginning to surge.

"You're insane!" Winston coughs, the ash and blood in his throat cementing.

"I've got at least nine more to finish off," Adeyemi says as he looks up the street, "then you."

Winston follows his gaze, back to the Aetria Corporate building, where every other Overwatch agent is cleaning up after their ambush. He can see them, but the others can't see him. They have a perimeter set up, and Mercy is tending to the wounded; Winston sees Jesse and Commander Morrison have been hit. It's then that he realizes he hasn't been listening to his comms; they have no idea what's coming their way.

"No," Winston whimpers as he realizes what Adeyemi is doing; Doomfist means to level the building he'd just sent Winston through, toppling it right onto the rest of Overwatch.

"No," he says louder, and he struggles to get up.

He feels it building inside of him, the same feeling he'd felt on the observatory floor on Horizon. The rage fills him, up to the top of his throat, but in those last six inches he feels something else, something cool and comforting. Love.

He knows what he has to do; there is still time, but not much.

He roars, and the rage takes hold, pouring out and seizing him, taking control; his hair stands on edge as he gets to his feet, blood rushing through him in a surge of adrenaline, and for once, he doesn't have to think what to do. Doomfist is raising his gauntlet, so he relies on instinct and passion. He forgets the pain.

He goes primal.

"I've lost my family once!" he yells as he charges Adeyemi, pummeling the pavement with each footfall; he puts everything he has into a punch that lands on Doomfist's chin, leveling him, "Not again!"

Winston holds nothing in reserve; everything is fair game. He beats Adeyemi against the asphalt, he bites, he pounds him with both hands, he rips the exoskeletal suit out of him. He tears skin and shatters bone.

He fights like a wild animal.

He fights until the muscles in his arms burn and his broken ribs scream for him to stop moving.

Adeyemi is bent, bloody and broken when Winston grabs him by the neck, his hand all but engulfing the entirety of his head, and gets ready to twist. He screams, louder than Adeyemi does in pain and fear, but before he goes through with it, he hears a voice.

"Winston!"

It's high pitched and afraid, and Winston whips around, Adeyemi still in his hands, to see Lena in the mouth of the alleyway, looking at him with wide eyes, horrified. She covers her mouth with both hands, and her eyes dart back and forth between the mangled body of Doomfist and Winston, his eyes red and his chest heaving angrily.

When she looks into his eyes, Winston snaps out of it, and he lets Doomfist fall to the ash.

More and more members of Overwatch trickle in after Tracer, hearing the commotion. Commander Morrison arrives second with a bandage around his arm, and stops in his tracks when he sees Doomfist at Winston's feet. Commander Reyes is right behind him, the Jesse, wounded in the shoulder but not badly. Then the rest arrive; most of them look at Winston with some kind of fearful reverence, but Gabriel Reyes just smiles. Winston doesn't look at any of them; he doesn't want to acknowledge that the convulsing wreck of flesh and bone and metal at his feet was his creation, his sculpture that started as a man, an evil man.

He doesn't want to face the others; he doesn't want them to see him this way, this savage way. So he pushes past them, and limps to the street, plopping down next to his glasses as all the pain rushes back to him. He blows the lenses off, and in their reflection he sees Lena, that same horrified look on her face as she looks at his back, and Angela kneels by Adeyemi's side.

Winston puts the glasses on, but he wipes his eyes first; it should never have come to this, but he did what he had to; up to a point. The animal in him had done the rest.

Then the pain rushes back, crippling him again.

Behind him, he hears Commander Morrison talking into the radio.

"HVT has been neutralized. Mission successful."

* * *

It's three days until they get back to the Watchpoint, three days spent helping the disaster response teams, sifting through the rubble to find people, most of them dead, most of them not even recognizable. But every now and then, they would pull somebody breathing out from the grey sea of death, and they would cheer.

The debriefs are long, but vague. All the brass are interested in is the body count and the damages: numbers. They don't ask about who was buried in that rubble, only how many. The final estimation is between six and eight thousand died in the attack; missing posters are all over Numbani for the next three months, a last hope of people denying their relatives and friends died because one man decided the crisis wasn't over yet.

To Winston's horror, a security camera outside of the Aetria Corporate building had captured his first punch on Adeyemi's chin, when he'd first gone primal. Thankfully, the rest of the fight's culmination happened just outside of the camera's frame of sight. The tape has gone viral; fans of Overwatch, kids, have dubbed the move, the "primal punch".

He came to find out that Overwatch medical staff had been able to save Doomfist; his gauntlet was confiscated, his assets were frozen, and he was sentenced to four hundred and thirty-six life sentences in a trial he was unable to attend as he was still suffering through a state funded medical recovery, which was more of a medical rebuilding thanks to Winston. A court of appeals granted him the death sentence a month later.

The other members of Overwatch treated him differently after Numbani. It took Tracer a while to talk to him normally after that day. Winston thought for a while she saw him as a monster; she definitely saw him as something more dangerous than she did before.

Gabriel Reyes seemed to like him a bit more, but he never let up on a chance to remind him of the time he'd gone savage, or tell others the story, in Winston's presence, of how he'd rounded the corner and seen Adeyemi's lower jaw hanging onto his skull by a strand of tendon and chunks of muscle hanging onto the exoskeleton after it had been torn out of his body, with Winston standing over him, "beating his chest like King-Kong".

Winston normally walked away before Reyes could finish the story. He knew it was a soft spot, and the disdain in his voice when he called him _monkey_ never did go away.

But after that day, Winston was one of the family. They'd bled together; they'd saved what was left of a city together. And regardless of what they thought of how he did it, he'd saved them.

One night, many weeks later, Winston enters Overwatch's intelligence database, and pulls every file they have on Akinjide Adeyemi.

Doomfist had lost his family too.

He grew up poor in Ghana, and had lost his family in the Omnic Crisis. His father and brother were military casualties. His mother died of malaria, because an Omnic siege kept medical aid arriving to deliver vaccines. His sister committed suicide soon after. He had been nineteen. With nothing left, he joined Ghana's militia, and waged a guerrilla war against the Omnium in Abuja. His unit suffered heavy casualties at the Battle of Cape Coast, the same battle the first Doomfist, Adhabu Ngumi, fought and died in to save the West Coast of Africa. Hence, "The Savior".

When peace was found, Adeyemi never stopped fighting; his war never ended. He started small, then graduated to mercenary work. By the time Talon found him, and gifted him the recovered and augmented kinetic gauntlet, all they had to do was point him in the right direction. A mad dog, yes, but he wasn't born bloodthirsty. What made his so evil was that he truly, at his core, believed what he was doing was right.

Winston remembers that day often, and not fondly.

Doomfist showed him the truth. He showed him how the world really works, how fragile it all is. He showed him that the only constant is change. He showed him that it's easier to see people as a code name, or as a target. Doomfist showed him what he could do, and that terrified him sometimes; he showed him that there is still an animal inside of him, no matter what.

Doomfist, The Savior, used his kinetic gauntlet to destroy thousands of Omnics as they advanced on cities all across western Africa. And in recent Shambali light, each and every one of those Omnics he destroyed had a soul. And for his destruction, the people of Nigeria and Ghana built statues and wrote ballads; they made a martyr into a hero, a symbol.

Doomfist, The Scourge, attacked Omnics too. But for him, the response was outrage, disgust. The only real difference between them is how African children would learn their names generations later, one as a hero, and one as a villain, for trying to destroy the same thing.

Years later, Overwatch would be treated the same way. A hero one day, a villain the next, because the world they served decided their service was no longer required.

Three days before he was to be executed, the prison he was being held in was attacked by an unidentified paramilitary force, and in the aftermath, Akinjide Adeyemi was left unaccounted for.

On that day, Reinhardt helped Winston get slobbering drunk.


	6. Ghosts

Gibraltar is a quiet place, but it's home. At least, it used to be home.

He and Athena are the only ones still around. Normal people don't consider computer programs friends, but Athena is all Winston has now.

When this fortress on a rocky outcropping had been home to hundreds of people, Winston would spend his nights in a laboratory, his place of refuge, doing whatever he or Commander Morrison had prioritized for that week. Only when the sky was turning from black to purple would he normally find a pillow in his habitation suite, and rest for a few hours.

Tonight, he walks the silent halls. There's a rhythm to it.

 _Knuckle_ , _foot, knuckle, foot, see if there's any peanut butter left in this jar or that one, knuckle foot, knuckle, foot, hit the tire swing and watch it swing, knuckle, foot, knuckle, foot, find something to do, or something to remember._

"Is everything alright Winston?" comes Athena's voice over the PA.

"Yes Athena," he says back, no one to look at while he talks, "I just can't sleep."

Winston had modeled Athena after the Omnic god-programs. When she was new, she was already the most advanced AI in the world, a supercomputer with a hangar full of servers as a brain and Overwatch's entirety of assets at her disposal. She's gotten smarter since then; all the best AI's learn, but Athena is special. She learned to have humanity. At first, it terrified Overwatch, having a more powerful computer than some governments' compilation of hardware with a personality.

 _Do you read me, Hal?_

Luckily, Athena decided she would be one of the good guys. In some ways, she had done more for the world than every one of Overwatch's agents combined in those last few years; the world was a hard place to fix with bullets and missiles in the digital age. Athena could do things no person could. Winston was glad for her, especially now.

He needed someone to talk to.

"Winston, has the recent invasion of Watchpoint Gibraltar by Talon made you uneasy here?" she asks, her tone fluctuating, "I can reassure you, the odds of Talon returning tonight are very low."

He keeps walking; he's in the old mess hall now.

"Restlessness is a characteristic symptom of post traumatic stress and major depression. If you would like, report to the medical bay, and I can provide a diagnosis."

He looks around at the empty tables, and he swears, he can smell currywurst and he can hear hear Captain Amari's voice, maternal and friendly, but with that higher pitch hinting that she was close to laughing.

 _"You need to take care of yourself Winston. What would we do if you were to fall ill? Nothing would get done and everything on base would stop working."_

He hears Torbjorn chuckle, and he feels Reinhardt's hand hit his shoulder with a friendly clap.

"Thanks, but I'm fine Athena," he sighs as he turns to go, "I'm just seeing ghosts."

Ana was like that: maternal. Her protective instinct was humbling. She always put her concern for others before her concern for herself. With her on the long gun, anyone under her protection might as well have been invincible, but she was more than a sniper. She was a hero, and a friend, and a mother. She was who kept all of Overwatch safe when things got bad and alive when they got even worse. She was good, always in the ops room during planning making sure each route was the best protected and always the first to go on recon, and she never sent anyone in her place, ever. It's what killed her, in the end.

She died on a rescue mission about three months before Switzerland. She stayed behind to cover the retreat when the strike team with the rescued hostages came under fire from a sniper. Her body was never recovered. They buried an empty casket in the Hadra War Cemetery.

Winston thinks of Fareeha, already a young officer, saluting the flag covered coffin as men in berets carried it past.

Winston keeps walking.

His ears twitch when he thinks he hears footsteps, but he soon realizes it's just the rain starting. It's autumn, the rainy season in this part of the world. Storms roll in daily, but Athena's forecast said the worst of this one would hit Casablanca, putting Gibraltar right on the brim of the clouds.

Through the window, in the distance, lightning flashes, and Winston is drawn to it.

He finds his way to the helicopter pad, despite Athena advising against it on the basis that he might catch a cold. He hears Ana in her robotic tone.

The split between the stars and the storm is right above him; to the south, the sky is flashing with bright blue streaks of electricity as they jump in between clouds and the ocean, and to his north, the night sky twinkles. He can see Venus, and Mars.

The moon is out; it's almost full. If he had a telescope, he could see Horizon.

Far below him, against the cliffs, the Mediterranean laps, each wave sounding like a breath from the sea itself.

Lightning flashes over Africa, the thunder grumbling at him a few moments after. As he feels the breeze and smells the surf, the light from the south snaps to dark once again, and Commander Morrison is with him, sitting on a fuel pod and his blue eyes looking up.

 _"Makes you feel small, doesn't it?"_

Winston would have agreed.

 _"You know what goes into each and every one of those stars up there, how much power is in just one thunderhead, just how huge everything is, and here we are, caught in the middle."_

Winston admires Orion's belt, and thinks of the pyramids built to imitate those same stars outside Cairo. Ana used to say she could see them from her apartment, before the Crisis. He knows Morrison is smiling with him.

 _"Makes you think, maybe there is a God after all."_

The man flicks a finger towards the moon, then crosses his arms.

 _"You ever miss it?"_ he asks.

"Yes," Winston says, "There's a lot that I miss."

Lightning flashes again, a bit closer this time, and Winston is alone once more.

He turns and goes back inside, before he is soaked as Athena warned.

Commander Morrison was a man with layers. His first layer was armor, a hollow suit that fought when it was told to where it was told to. His second layer dared to ask why, and his third layer answered: _for them_. Anyone else: his team, civilians, other soldiers he didn't even know. Bleed, so they don't have to. The Soldier Enhancement Program built men into specimens of human aggression, walking weapons with superhuman muscles and minds; Commander Morrison, Gabriel Reyes, they were super soldiers. They could do things other people couldn't, and so the world called on them to do things others wouldn't be able to. Winston thinks it was that third layer that made Commander Morrison have faith in him, to push for his induction to Overwatch against everyone who said a UN coalition was no place for a freak. Commander Morrison was a great man because got Winston into Overwatch, made him an agent, made him head lab technician and director of research and development because he didn't care who Winston was, he cared for what he could do.

 _I have a dream..._

Winston's vigil persists, and next he finds himself inside his old lab, looking up at the blueprints he holds onto as keepsakes. The chronal accelerator, the bubble shield, even a schematic for a reverse engineered Doomfist gauntlet.

A thought crosses his mind, and he picks up a soldering iron, fiddling with the shield to see if he can get it to stop blowing up somehow before his patience leaves and he keeps wandering these empty halls.

"Winston, you are aware of the definition of insanity?" Athena says, and he snorts; if anything's driving him insane, it isn't this.

Sparks begin to fall slowly, like tiny fireflies flashing through his worktable, and in the wisps of smoke, someone joins him.

 _"What are you working on?"_ he hears Reyes say from behind him from, the voice coming silently up from a time after Numbani had already been rebuilt by Vishkar after Doomfist trashed it, and well before the ink on the Petras Act had dried.

 _"Something useless, I'm sure,"_ he adds, but Winston does not reply.

Winston hears two pairs of boots, one with spurs, but Jesse, Reyes' constant companion, doesn't say anything as his lighter flicks a flame, and he lights a smoke. Reyes leans against Winston's work table, his arms crossed and he pretends to be intrigued by his creation as his holstered guns brush against the tabletop.

 _"Your debrief from Numbani was just declassified,"_ he says, that look on his face saying 'I know something you don't.'

Winston looks at him over the lenses of his glasses for a moment, then goes back to his task at hand. Reyes seems to be prying, trying to provoke some kind of defense, but Winston doesn't give him the satisfaction. His armor is on, in more ways than one.

 _"So,"_ Reyes begins again, smiling at the pettiness of their relationship, _"between keeping a building from coming down on us and helping out that Oxton kid..."_

His smile fades, and Reyes looks Winston in the eyes, even though those amber eyes are still ignoring him, expecting some sort of harassing comment or a sprinkle of salt in some open wound Winston didn't even know was vulnerable. He keeps working, expecting to be called _monkey_ any time.

 _"You're alright, Winston."_

The gorilla freezes. He sets the soldering iron down slowly, he takes off his glasses, and slowly, he looks up at Reyes' brown eyes, and strangely, they are at the same height as his are. The corner of Reyes' mouth threatens to smile, but it never comes. Winston is free of his armor's burden for one moment, and it feels so liberating he doesn't quite know what to say. This is as close to any form of acceptance Reyes has ever shown him, and the last time it will ever be shown, but it happened, and they both know, and they will both remember. Reyes still always thought Winston was beneath him, but now that margin was smaller, at least in Winston's mind.

They share a nod, and then Reyes is gone.

Gabriel Reyes was a hard man, but he was not without love. He hated weakness, and never showed any. Sometimes his cruelty knew no bounds, and other times he would risk his neck in a firefight to pull a child out of the line of fire before killing everyone shooting at him. But the world he knew was a hard world to live in. He was what circumstance made him; Morrison got Overwatch, he got Blackwatch. Before that, the two weren't so different. And so for him to let Winston into that hard world, to trust him enough to acknowledge he belonged...

Jack Morrison and Gabrel Reyes both died when the Swiss Watchpoint went up. The leading theory was sabotage, and conspiracies abound as to culprits. Reyes is one of the names. Winston hopes it isn't true, but he isn't an idiot either. Athena was able to find the footage a security camera in the Watchpoint had captured deep inside some ancient Overwatch drive, with Reyes and Blackwatch trading shots with Morrison and an Overwatch security detachment. Everyone was hit, the room hardly recognizable as a lobby, but when the flash from the bombs came, Morrison and Reyes were still fighting. Winston has asked why a thousand times, but dead men tell no tales.

Jack's empty casket was laid down in a tomb in Arlington after a parade. Winston was there, with all of Overwatch. Gabriel's empty casket was buried in Camp Pendleton quietly, only those who knew him, if they could bear coming, in the procession. Winston didn't... couldn't... go.

The shield still won't cooperate, so Winston heads to Athena's interface.

"What are all of their statuses?" he asks.

It's a habit of his, to check up on the others. Athena can access any news database, and not many servers or archives are out of her reach. The Petras Act may prohibit him from seeing them in person, but he can see them on his computer screen.

One by one, they show up on the monitor. Angela is still doing medical work in the third world; this week, it's Iraq, and she's with Doctors Without Borders. Genji is still in Nepal with the Shambali; Winston wonders what Mondatta's death did to him. Jesse is drifting America and Reinhardt is drifting Europe. Torbjorn is at home in Sweden with his wife and children, enjoying retirement, and Lena is still fighting to make the world a better place with her fiance, Emily, in London.

At least she had responded to his recall so far. But even then, communications were sporadic; she had committed, but the situation was still delicate, and he couldn't ask her to drop everything and move back to Gibraltar at a moment's notice. Illegal, immoral, illogical.

He wants to see them all. He wants with everything he has to just see them again.

The Petras Act. Winston never thought a paper cut would hurt him so badly. He's been cursing the UN legislators ever since the bill was even proposed. He lost everything when it was signed. He lost everyone.

But then, three more show up on the monitor. Winston squints at the icons.

Jack Morrison- Last Known Location: Giza, Egypt

Gabriel Reyes- Last Known Location: Giza, Egypt

Ana Amari- Last Known Location: Giza, Eqypt

"Athena, what's this?" he asks.

Athena thinks for a moment.

"Analysis indicates the individuals in question have been detected in the respective locations," she says.

Winston stares at the monitor for a minute before he speaks again.

"Show the identification evidence."

More amateur footage pops up on the screen, a firefight inside some compound in Egypt. Athena's algorithms analyze the three's posture, fighting styles, armament, anything and everything up to facial recognition and hypothetical restructuring. Her conclusion: the three fighting are the ghosts Winston has been talking to.

Winston is floored. He thinks for an hour, about his dead friends that he is watching try to kill each other in a compound in Egypt. He stares at the screen until his eyes water.

"Athena, pull up available footage of the vigilantes, Soldier 76 and Ghost, and the mercenary, Reaper."

More footage, more conspiracies, more tidbits of the Ghost and the Soldier 76 and the Reaper Athena flashes in front of him, and the more it makes sense. The hits on Talon and Vishkar, the AO's, the assets, the disdain in the Reaper's voice when he called him _monkey._ Maybe they are alive.

His hope is outweighed by logic, but not by much. As he walks the halls until dawn, he thinks to himself if they can really be alive. And if so, how?

The sun comes up, and he is no closer to an answer.


	7. Homeward Bound

On Sundays, Winston watches the ocean. He has a favorite cove among the few on the Watchpoint, where the gulls are quieter than anywhere else on the island and the waves seem to reflect the setting sun with a slightly more settling palate of orange. Every now and then, he sees a ship on the horizon, a yacht or a tanker or a small sailboat on its way to Sicily or France, and in between the breaths of the sea, he imagines himself on its deck, bound for anywhere else but here.

The Mediterranean can be a fickle mistress. Sometimes, she covers herself in a grey veil, and her ebbs and flows take an edge as her wind stings those that come too close, leaving her shivering company to stew in the cold of her disdain. Other nights she takes to black, and rages against the dying of the light as she dashes her skies with the flashes and rumbles of a torrential squall. On more than one occasion, here, where not even Athena can hear him, Winston has joined in her anger, leaving all tact and manners behind to scream and beat his chest at God or the dead or Reyes or whoever else might be listening, and for once, to feed his heart and not his mind, to shout why instead of asking how, and to die a little bit each time.

When he first came to Earth, it was a few hundred miles from here where he landed, in the English Channel. That day, the Atlantic was blue, but restless. Apes can't swim, and so it was a long wait, tainted by the smells of sea sickness within the cramped module bobbing in the grey waves, before the first trawler came puttering up to him. When he looked outside to the fishermen that found him, they all jumped and began excitedly talking in French, but when he asked them if they spoke English, they dropped their gaff hooks and lines, and sped back to the Norman coast without him.

The next boat came out with flashing lights, a crew armed with guns and animal control sticks, and more than a few cameras. Winston was happy to get to dry land by any means necessary then, the water bottomless and waiting to swallow him up. He didn't care about the lines around his neck or the prods in his back. He just wanted off of the churning surface that reached up to drag him down, and steal all that he could be.

But today, the sea is calm. The sky is empty. He is drawn to its shores. The horizon is gold and pink and red and orange, and the water softly laps at his feet, the same beautiful colors above as below. He's surrounded by endless indifference, but there is a tranquility in it. A peace, however ironic, settles over him as the hypnotic lapse between the tiniest waves fade into the recesses of his awareness. A memory of Lena, here with him at the same place many years ago, crosses his mind. The sun is in her hair and her smile is slight, her eyes closed as she takes in the warmth of Spain, and her feet kick from her perch on a boulder, the water splashing up gently to try and meet her.

He kicks a rock into the waves, and both the stone and the thought sink into the depths. He's reminded of his place in all of this; surrounded by the world, the sea and the sky with nowhere to go. He's an animal in the zoo, a prisoner in that he cannot escape, and living in a place that is not home. Today, he's on an island, but there was a time when he was his own ship's captain in an armada of warships, able to command the oceans instead of becoming a slave to them, and the world was his to live.

His fleet left with Overwatch, and his own sails abandoned him here, too torn and rent from the gales of war to carry him on. They all still worked to save the world their own way, or went home to their families. Winston only has one option; waiting.

He's always regretted not being able to have a family. He'll have no one to go home to the way the others might. He'll never find a wife or rear children. He's the only one of his kind, neither man nor beast. He was condemned to a lonesome life when he splashed into the Atlantic all those years ago, and it was Overwatch that suspended his curse for a few years. In those years, he did find love, but what could come of it? Some memories? Some regrets? Some fuel for rage filled shouts to the storms at night, with lightning flashing in his eyes and thunder drowning out his roar?

Neither man nor beast, but at times, he is more one than the other.

And so this island is his cage, his cell, his solitary confinement and his exile from everything that could have been. His message is out, and all he can do is wait for them to come. Lena said she would; he hoped Reinhardt would hear too, and come on his own accord. Morrison, and Amari, and McCree. All the captains of all the ships in the grandest armada the world had ever seen would one day come coursing back to him, and the great fleet that saved the world so many times would sail together again. It would never be the same, but at the helm of that frigate is where Winston always felt perfectly at home, and that's all he ever really wanted.

So here he waits, on a silent cove alone with the sea and the sky and Athena and all his memories to keep him company, imagining the day a ship appears on the horizon, and instead of sailing past it charts a course straight for him. And when it gets closer, he sees the silhouettes of his heroes, his friends, his family, on the bow, and when they make harbor in the safety of his port, it's Lena's voice that welcomes him home.

It'll be any day now when they arrive, he thinks to himself as the sun dips into the ocean, and the clear sky is dappled with stars. He's waited for so long, but he'll be homeward bound again soon.

Any day now...


End file.
